Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A classic sweet Australian wine with wonderful complexity. Full body, very sweet with almond, brunt lemon and light toffee character. This is from solera aged tokay with about 15 to 20 years in barrel.
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Wine Enthusiast
A bargain among Down Under fortifieds, Buller's Victorian blended Tokay features wonderfully complex notes of tea, spice and citrus atop lush caramel-like sweetness. It's silky and balanced, with a long citrusy finish.
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Wine Spectator
Buller's moderately priced Tokay offers a range of delicious flavors, a whole dessert in a glass. Unctuously sweet, rich in texture and long, playing out its creme brulee, orange peel and evanescent remnants of cherry fruit as the wine coats the mouth luxuriantly. Drink now.
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.