Winemaker Notes
Fermented and aged in new French oak for six months.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Vivid notes of plum tart and cinnamon play on the nose. On the palate, the intense sweetness is carried by lovely, tart and welcomed freshness. There is something tingling about this, and a lovely, tart, alluring bitterness. All is here in a totally compact, fresh, sweet package of surprising intensity. The finish lasts and lasts.
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James Suckling
A red BA? Yes, this crazy stuff has plenty of maraschino cherries and some cooked black plums! Taste like a crazy marriage of cherry-liqueur chocolates and a white BA. The touch of tannin helps the acidity to balance the full sweetness. Where is the blue cheese? Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Zweigelt Beerenauslese offers a very delicate and elegant bouquet with reduced fruit aromas but floral notes. The palate is highly refined and filigreed, beautifully balanced and shows lovely plum and walnut flavors as well as delicate sweetness and a well-structured and stimulating finish. Absolutely delicious!
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.
Fog and humidity arise from the Neusiedlersee (lake), and extend over the wet flatlands region of the same name, all the way to Austria’s border with Hungary. This moisture, coupled with the daily sunshine that reflects from its wet surfaces, serves as the perfect environment for the development of the desirable fungus called, Botrytis cinerea.
This fungus causes the grapes to essentially “rot” and dry, concentrating their sugars for harvest. It also helps the grapes develop intricate phenolic complexities leading to some of the most sought-after and unique sweet wines in the world. Austrian law categorizes these botrytized, sweet wines according to the must weight (sugar concentration) at harvest in the same way as the Germans. So the wines will be labeled, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Trockenbeerenauslese and Eiswein.
While the region’s reputation has historically ridden on the success of its sweet, botrytized wines, in 2011, Austria granted the official appellation of origin, Neusiedlersee, to its high quality Zweigelt red wines. As a result, any of its prestigious sweet wines will be actually be labeled after the general region of Burgenland.
Neusiedlersee’s slopes of mica, schist, limestone and variations in gravel, sand and clay make it ideal for its indigenous red varieties, Blaufränkisch, St. Laurent and Zwiegelt, as well as the international varieties of Pinot Noir (Blauburgunder), Merlot, Cabernet and even Syrah.
Though not widely planted here, some white wines, such as Pinot Blanc (Weissburgunder), have distinguished themselves locally.