Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
This offers a wide range of blood orange marmalade, apricot, peach and mango notes all tightly stitched together but unfurling steadily through the opulent finish, picking up nectarine, kumquat and ginger notes. And then there's a racy feel echoing at the very end, giving this lovely lift. A beauty. Muscat de Frontignan. Drink now through 2035.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2011 Vin de Constance Natural Sweet Wine spent 36 months in 60% new French and Hungarian oak. It delivers 152 grams per liter residual sugar with a pH of 3.6. Here it is very perfumed with a dried honey, lanolin, marmalade and melted wax-scented bouquet that is nicely defined. The palate is viscous on the entry with fine acidity, quite sensual in the mouth with orange zest and marmalade notes, almost Barsac-like towards the finish that lingers long in the mouth. Gorgeous (as per usual).
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.
One of the most famous and celebrated wine regions imported throughout Europe during the 18th century, Constantia was founded in 1685 by a Dutch governor named Simon van der Stel who ran a successful wine farm for many years.
Constantia vineyards, planted in ancient soil beds, climb up the east-facing slopes of the Constantiaberg, where the vines receive cool sea breezes blowing in from False Bay.