Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
An exquisitely floral honeysuckle aroma surrounds a creamy yet sharp note of passion fruit, while a peppery verve tingles around the edges. The palate has the same playful character: a floral tease here, a full-blown passion-fruit kiss there, a total embrace of sweetness balanced by a sure-footed command of acid that draws everthing together and assembles a newly precise picture with every sip. This is so heady, so delicious, so pure, so moreish that it should be a controlled substance. This should hold well through 2040, at least
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James Suckling
A dense, exotic fruit-coulis character with plenty of floral honey and a touch of lemon zest. Stunning concentration and vibrancy, the acidity whipping the great, citrusy finish along at brisk clip. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Fermented and aged for 18 months in stainless steel tanks, the 2015 Trockenbeerenauslese No 4 Scheurebe Zwischen den Seen has a fascinating clear, fresh and elegant nose with lychee, passion fruit and pink grapefruit notes but also refreshing stony (gravelly) and herbal/spicy aromas. This is just brilliant! Round and lush on the palate, this is a generous and wide-spanning TBA with fine tannins and ripe acidity. It is sweet and luscious on the palate, highly elegant and beautifully balanced since the richness comes along on a gravelly riverbed that gives freshness and a stimulating mineral structure. Very tropical fruit flavors come through on the long and tightly woven finish (mango, passionfruit, kaki). With 10% alcohol and 226 grams of residual sugar, this is an impressive but sweet and rich Scheurebe.
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Wine Spectator
Very floral, with a thick, glossy texture, but maintaining grace, thanks to the vibrant acidity. Shows good structure and focus, featuring flavors of honeycomb, peach cobbler and dried mango that give this an immediate appeal, but this is destined for the long haul. Drink now through 2032.
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).