Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Vinous
The 2023 Riesling Late Harvest is aromatically similar to the Semi-Dry Riesling from the same vintage, with citrus peel and tropical fruit speaking clearly. Fresh and clean, the 2023 delivers such a sensual texture. It’s a wine of supreme finesse and, like all of these Rieslings, it never falters. Residual sugar is 56 grams per liter.
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James Suckling
Candied orange peel, nectarine and white cardamom aromas are brisk and generous. A quiet kick of acidity on the mid-palate and finish stays phenolically complex and layered. Sweet, but not definingly so.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Budget-minded fans of sweeter Rieslings will want to load up on the 2023 Riesling Late Harvest, which comes mainly from the Josef Vineyard but sells for just a bit more than half the price. There's no notable botrytis influence here, the nose being a pristine fruit salad of green apple, peach, kiwifruit and pineapple. Weighing at 8.3% alcohol and 53 grams per liter residual sugar, it's medium-bodied and creamy-textured, with a lush, elegant finish.
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.