Winemaker Notes
This richly textured wine displays fresh tropical aromas of papaya, mango and apricot. Bold fruit flavors balanced with fine acidity caress the palate with an exquisite silky finish.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Floral aromatics of bergamot and orange, then on to a palate of dried apple, apricot compote and a taught acidity.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Vidal Reserve Icewine comes in with 9.7% alcohol, 248 grams of residual sugar and 11 grams of total acidity. Clean and pure on opening, this quickly acquires a richer and more concentrated feel—and there is plenty of richness and concentration here. This was tasted from a 187-milliliter bottle (a quarter bottle), to which the price applies. Smaller formats are often considered less likely to age well, so take that into consideration. I've been conservative here in the end-date drinking window.
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.
Home of the Niagara Peninsula wine region, Ontario leads as Canada’s region with the most area under vine. Ontario’s main grape varieties include Merlot, Pinot noir, Cabernet Franc and Riesling. The latter two show great success here for the production of ice wines, along with Vidal blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon.