Winemaker Notes
This traditional dessert wine is honey-yellow color, with flavors of dried fruits, apricot, orange zest and herbs.
An ideal pairing wine for foie gras, fruit-based desserts and creamy desserts like crème brûlée and cheesecake.
Blend: 80% Assyrtiko, 10% Aidani, 10% Athiri
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Yiannis Argyros was the king of Vinsanto before his death in 2012; he carried on a tradition that predates that of Tuscany’s sweet wines. His son, Matthew, now continues the tradition, seeing the wines through long barrel aging to take on their characteristic complexity. Although this is one of the estate’s younger wines, it’s spectacular. A blend of assyrtiko with aidani and athiri, late-harvested and sun-dried on a pumice plateau, this aged in oak barrels for four years. It stuns with its power, the acidity and sugar delivering honeyed flavors with spine-tingling intensity. It tastes of butter toffee and orange zest, vanilla and lemon, with herbal notes that accent its briskness and clarity. Masterful.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
