Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
The perfume of fully ripe, lusciously juicy peach is nearly overwhelming. It is joined by notions of barley-sugar and candied apricot. There is a more tart notion of passion fruit, too, as well as a guiding, lightning flash of welcome acidity that brings a punch of citrus zest. This TBA is like a very potent flavor bomb that not only delivers luscious sweetness but also a counterpoint of acidic thrill. Needless to say, this simply lingers and lasts. Nectar indeed.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Grande Cuvée Trockenbeerenauslese No 6 Nouvelle Vague blends 60% Chardonnay with 40% Welschriesling, and opens with a deep, intense and highly complex bouquet with spicy flavors from the new barriques. Sauternes style. Smooth and sweet, highly elegant and concentrated on the palate, this is a viscous and firmly structured TBA of great complexity and length. This is a long-distance runner that should be aged for another 5-10 years. Rating: 94(+) Points
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).