Winemaker Notes
Bright yellow with silver reflections. Pronounced honeyed notes over attractive aromas of ripe stone fruit, subtle spices and mineral character. Nuances of juicy yellow fruit with vibrant acidity; highly elegant and balanced with a touch of salt, leading to a lingering mandarin finish.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
All the dried fruit, brulee character and boldness we expect from a Burgenland BA!. Lush, creamy and concentrated with live-wire acidity that drives the very long, succulent and spicy finish. Drink or hold.
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Decanter
Lifted nose of dried apricots, peach jam, raisins, nougat and cassata siciliana. Vibrant acidity on the palate, well-defined texture. Blend : 40% Chardonnay, 60% Welschriesling
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Blending 70% Welschriesling with 30% Chardonnay, the 2018 Cuvée Beerenauslese offers a fascinating, precise and spicy quince and refreshing lemon zest aroma and even salinity. Bottled with 135 grams per liter of residual sugar, this is a highly elegant, refined and perfectly balanced Cuvée with precision, lingering salinity and delicate freshness. Sustainable candied fruit aromas. This is a gorgeous BA that should go perfectly well with mature cheese, certainly Kaiserschmarrn (torn pancake) and salted popcorn.
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Wine Enthusiast
A lovely and graceful sweet-styled white, showing aromas of apricot and melon, with dried mango, mint jelly and spicy honey making it an intriguing drink. It is never over the top, but you definitely have to be into the style to appreciate this fully.
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.
The source of Austria’s finest botrytized sweet wines, Burgenland covers a lofty portion of Austria's wine producing real estate. It encompasses the smaller regions of Neusiedlersee, Neusiedlersee-Hügelland, Mittelburgenland and Südburgenland. The latter two are most associated with their exceptional red wines. The region as a whole produces no shortage of important whites.
Neusiedlersee, named for the lake that it surrounds to the east, is home to a great diversity of grape varieties. The region’s most notable wines, however, are the botrytis-infected, sweet versions.
Neusiedlersee-Hügelland, which wraps the lake on its western side, includes the town of Rust, a historically esteemed wine community. Its close proximity to the lake’s fog and mist make it another source of some of the more prestigious botrytized wines. Neusiedlersee-Hügelland also produces fine Blaufränkisch, Pinot Blanc, Neuburger and Grüner Veltliner, though a label will usually name the more general, Burgenland, so as not to confuse it with its eastern cousin, Neusiedlersee, across the lake.
Blaufränkisch is well suited to and makes up over half of the vineyard area in Mittelburgenland. The region’s hills and plateaus, which are composed of variations in schist, loess and clay-limestone, produce high quality reds with interesting diversity.
Südburgenland, also known for its deep, complex and age-worthy Blaufränkisch, is beginning to turn out some alluring whites from Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling and Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc).