Winemaker Notes
Muscat can be an interesting match for a range of fruit desserts and puddings; also good with soft, ripe blue cheeses and nuts.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
R.L. Buller & Son was founded in 1921 by the grandfather of Andrew Buller, the current winemaker. The winery remains one of the benchmarks in the production of fortified sweet wines from the warm terroir of Rutherglen.
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Wine Enthusiast
Bullers entry-level Muscat blend sourced from inside and outside Rutherglen itself is a terrific value. It's perfumed yet full bodied and rich, with sweet notes of golden raisins and dried figs, as well as darker hints of dates and molasses.
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Wine Spectator
Bright and sweet, with aromatic spices and prune flavors, picking up a nice hint of dried cherry and strawberry as the finish lingers. Drink now. 5,000 cases made.
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.
Nestled into the tip of its southeastern coastline, Victoria is Australia’s smallest mainland state, second most populous and third largest wine producer. Victoria includes the cool regions of Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula and Geelong, made famous mainly by impressive Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
The more inland Heathcote and Bendigo lead the way for complex and textured, full-bodied reds. Rutherglen’s fortified wines compete among the best on the planet.