Winemaker Notes
Bright golden-yellow. Bouquet of meadow herbs, delicate notes of stone fruit and lychee. The palate is fresh and vibrant, with nuances of pineapple, and tropical fruit notes on the finish, omplemented with a hint of honey in the aftertaste. Good grip.
Pair with duck liver terrine with Cumberland sauce, Briemousse with sour jelly and beer tart with mint.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A pinkish hue of amber signals an unusual wine. The perfumed nose of rose petal and Turkish delight marks this out for utter seduction, while heady spice and lifted honeysuckle only increase the sensuousness. Both sweetness and spice give even more of themselves on the palate, where a wonderfully crunchy phenolic backbone provides structure alongside the wonderfully sharp acidity. This is a full-on pleasure bomb of floral and fruity intensity, whose aromatic, rose-scented echoes are beyond memorable. A wine to meditate over. Drink until 2040, at least.
Editors' Choice -
James Suckling
Lots of pepper, cinnamon and cloves on the nose make a bold statement. Generous body with a great interplay between black plums, healthy, dry tannins and impressive length. A blend of zweigelt with some blaufrankisch that spent almost three years in wood. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 (Trockenbeerenauslese) No 1 (Rosenmuskateller) Nouvelle Vague has a bright cherry color and opens with a delicate bouquet of rose petals and red fruits, such as stewed and roasted plums, with cloves and other Christmas spices. On the palate, this is an intense, pure and elegant TBA with fine tannins and a long, spicy (cloves) finish with roasted plum flavors. This is not overly sweet (132 grams of residual sugar) but is beautifully balanced. Although the acidity is analytically not really significant, the wine has a lovely freshness and elegance.
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Wine Spectator
Floral, currant and medicinal herb flavors mark this light-weight dessert style. Moderately sweet and ends with a touch of bitterness. Rosenmuskateller. Drink now through 2025.
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).