Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
We finished the tasting with the 2016 Riesling Kick On Dessert, the finest vintage of this cuvée to date. Lychee, honey, white flowers and hints of white peach and apricot give way to a gorgeously rich, impeccably balance sweet, downright irresistible dessert wine.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: Pastry chefs like dessert wine producers are often forgotten because people have eaten too much of their entrée or drank too much of the main dinner wine (usually red), but dessert wines deserve just as much attention. The 2016 Ojai Dessert Riesling is an outstanding effort. TASTING NOTES: This wine is concentrated, sweet, and well-balanced. Its aromas and flavors of ripe apples and peaches would pair up well with a multi-fruit pie. (Tasted: August 31, 2018, San Francisco, CA)
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.
A lesser-known but elite AVA within the larger Santa Barbara district, the Santa Maria Valley AVA runs precisely west to east starting near the coast. The valley funnels cool, Pacific Ocean air to the vineyards more inland, allowing grapes a longer hang time to ripen evenly and achieve their full potential by harvest time. Combined with minimal rainfall, consistent warm sunshine, and well-drained soils, it is an ideal environment for grape growing.
Many of the wineries here are small and highly respected, having established a reputation in the 1970s and 80s for producing excellent Central Coast wines like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. More recently, Syrah has also proven quite successful in the region. Many vineyards are owned by growers who sell their grapes to other wineries, so it is common to see the same vineyard name on bottlings from different wineries. Bien Nacido Vineyard is perhaps the best-known and most prestigious.