Quady Elysium Black Muscat 2016
Winemaker Notes
Elysium makes stunning spritzers and cocktails. Try the Elysium spritzer in the summertime as a light patio pleaser. Or mix it up with whiskey, lemon, and sweetener for an Elysium Sour. Add it to sparkling wine in place of creme de cassis to make a black muscat rendition of the popular French ‘kir royale.’
The heart on the Elysium label is drawn by artist Ardison Phillips. The label design is by Laurel Quady.
Critical Acclaim
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In a small San Joaquin valley town, Madera (CA), Andrew Quady discovered an unused patch of rare Orange Muscat grape, known in Italy as Moscato Fior d’Arancio. These grapes became the first Essensia Orange Muscat Dessert Wine in 1980.
Essensia’s creation marked the birth of Quady Winery's Muscat expertise - where the rich flavors of rare Muscat varieties are celebrated and intensified rather than blended and softened. Since then, Andrew Quady has produced other well-known wines including Elysium, Electra Mosc
ato, Starboard Vintage and Batch 88, as well as the first premium American vermouth of its kind – Vya Vermouth.
The varieties used by Quady Winery are rare, delicious expressions of the fruit filled San Joaquin Valley. The winemaking style is rich, full bodied, perfectly balanced, and unparalleled in any other Muscat you can find. For many, Quady Winery has become known as the experts of sweet wine.
Responsible for the vast majority of American wine production, if California were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest wine-producing nation. The state’s diverse terrain and microclimates allow for an incredible range of red wine styles, and unlike tradition-bound Europe, experimentation is more than welcome here. California wineries range from tiny, family-owned boutiques to massive corporations, and price and production are equally varied. Plenty of inexpensive bulk wine is made in the Central Valley area, while Napa Valley is responsible for some of the world’s most prestigious and expensive “cult” wines.
Each American Viticultural Area (AVA) and sub-AVA of has its own distinct personality, allowing California to produce red wine of every fashion: from bone dry to unctuously sweet, still to sparkling, light and fresh to rich and full-bodied. In the Napa Valley, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc dominate vineyard acreage. Sonoma County is best known for Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Rosé and Zinfandel. The Central Coast has carved out a niche with Rhône Blends based on Grenache and Syrah, while Mendocino has found success with cool climate varieties such as Pinot noir, Riesling and Gewürztraminer. With all the diversity that California wine has to offer, any wine lover will find something to get excited about here.
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.