Winemaker Notes
It is versatile when drunk, providing a new array of possibilities in each sip.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Amber in the glass, this Hungarian late harvest wine has aromas of acacia honey, beeswax, honeycomb and apricot. In the mouth there are flavors of apricot, yellow peach, caramelized pineapple, rose petal and white peach. It has good heft on the palate with a final note of caramelized ginger in the post palate.
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Wine Spectator
A bright, lively late-harvest wine that pushes just past off-dry, with a lightly mouthcoating texture and flavors of ripe and juicy yellow peach, candied pink grapefruit peel, blood orange sorbet and aromatic hints of cardamom and elderflower. Furmint, Sárga Muskotály and Zéta. Drink now through 2028.
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.
Best known for lusciously sweet dessert wines but also home to distinctive dry whites and reds, Hungary is an exciting country at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. Mostly flat with a continental climate, Hungary is almost perfectly bisected by the Danube River (known here as the Duna), and contains central Europe’s largest lake, Balaton. Soil types vary throughout the country but some of the best vines, particularly in Tokaj, are planted on mineral-rich, volcanic soil.
Tokaj, Hungary’s most famous wine region, is home to the venerated botrytized sweet wine, Tokaji, produced from a blend of Furmint and Hárslevelű. Dry and semi-dry wines are also made in Tokaj, using the same varieties. Other native white varieties include the relatively aromatic and floral, Irsai Olivér, Cserszegi Fűszeres and Királyleányka, as well as the distinctively smoky and savory, Juhfark. Common red varieties include velvety, Pinot Noir-like Kadarka and juicy, easy-drinking Kékfrankos (known elsewhere as Blaufränkisch).