Winemaker Notes
Enjoy with desserts like bittersweet Belgian chocolate, figs, chocolate mousse cake, fine mild cheeses and fresh fruit, pecan pie, dried fruits and nuts.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is a wonderful tawny with lavender, dried fruit, prune and orange peel. Full body, medium sweet and a flavorful finish. The Rutherglen character is here!
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
These blends represent the newest bottled offerings from this Rutherglen producer, an area that produces spectacular fortifieds, especially the Muscats and Tokays (actually Muscadelle). Their freshness, good acidity, soaring aromatics, and unctuous flavors must be tasted to be believed. The real values are the less expensive cuvees generally produced from 5- to 6-year-old solera systems... The Victoria Tawny exhibits a medium garnet color in addition to sweet, unctuous strawberry and cherry fruit. It is a blend of four grapes, Carina, Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache, and Shiraz.
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.