Winemaker Notes
Lush tropical aromas announce the ripeness of the Riesling Late Harvest. Sourced from select blocks in Hermann J. Wiemer's Josef, Magdalena and HJW Vineyards, this structured, balanced Riesling shows a subtle minerality that underscores its pleasing and fruit-dense finish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A vibrant off-dry Riesling with a lot of baking-spice and pie-crust character, as well as peach and exotic-fruit aromas. Juicy and zesty, the racy acidity giving it a lot of power. Some may find the finish a little tart, but we love the energy it gives the wine. Drink or hold.
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Wine & Spirits
This smells of warm peach slices dusted with cardamom, spicy and a touch floral. The flavors are heady and exotic, with a tropical richness made more unusual by that spice. It needs a bit of time to knit, but seems tailor-made for fennel-rubbed pork loin.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2021 Riesling Late Harvest comes in with 47 grams of residual sugar and 9% alcohol. Sugar becomes the keynote here, but this is hardly all that sweet. It's just young and lush. The sugar on the finish makes the overall presentation a bit nicer, perhaps, than on the other wines in the lineup since it covers up any missing expression of fruit in this rainy vintage. The price is nice too, but you will have to like that sugary edge. There's not a lot of intensity, but this still has a shot at holding pretty well. If I had a quibble, it did seem to get a little funky in aromatics as it aired out. It still showed well overall, though, so let's lean up for the moment.
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.
Increasingly garnering widespread and well-deserved attention, New York ranks third in wine production in the United States (after California and Washington). Divided into six AVAs—the Finger Lakes, Lake Erie, Hudson River, Long Island, Champlain Valley of New York and the Niagara Escarpment, which crosses over into Michigan as well as Ontario, Canada—the state experiences varied climates, but in general summers are warm and humid while winters are very cold and can carry the risk of frost well into the growing season.
The Finger Lakes region has long been responsible for some of the country’s finest Riesling, and is gaining traction with elegant, light-bodied Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc. Experimentation with cold-hardy European varieties is common, and recent years have seen the successful planting of grapes like Grüner Veltliner and Saperavi (from the Eastern European country of Georgia). Long Island, on the other hand, has a more maritime climate influenced by the Atlantic Ocean, and shares some viticultural characteristics with Bordeaux. Accordingly, the best wines here are made from Merlot and Cabernet Franc. The Niagara Escarpment is responsible for excellent ice wines, usually made from the hybrid variety, Vidal.