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 creme brulee and cheesecake.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Honeyed, roasted peach, candied citrus, ginger and toffee bouquet. Baked Meyer lemon, orange marmalade, cold coffee and nut bar appear on the palate. Complex, concentrated and fresh – fantastic balance of acidity and sweetness.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Vinsanto 4 Years Barrel Aged is a traditional blend, mostly (80%) Assyrtiko, with the rest evenly divided between the island's typical blending grapes, Aidani and Athiri. It comes in with 13% alcohol, 220 grams of residual sugar and 7.37 of total acidity. The grapes are sun-dried for 10 days and then spend four years in barrel. I had a noted preference for the 2011 this issue, as it showed more complexity and what I like to call more gravitas. This might get to the same place in time, but it is less well defined today. Textured, powerful and gripping on the finish, it still has rich flavors and plenty of power. Concentrated and intense, it could well improve in the bottle too. We'll lean up for the moment. As often noted, these do hold a long time, barring cork failures. The drinking window is just a rough guide. The rapidly rising price references a 500-milliliter bottle.
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.
