Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
In the glass, the 1908 Centennial Collection Para Vintage Tawny is the deep color of a smoke-stained sunset—burnt amber and garnet, dried blood and ironstone. Aromatically, the wine leads with notes of toasted maple and Italian hazelnut, dark chocolate, sweet licorice, Biscoff biscuit and old library. This is a wine of intensity and sweetness, savory nuance and unctuous drive. The wine pools on the palate in a glob; it takes some time for the saliva to penetrate and break it down. Once that happens and only after that happens through the finish, do yet more flavors reveal themselves. There remains some vinous complexity here, with cedary, spicy, dry sandalwood notes.
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.
Historically and presently the most important wine-producing region of Australia, the Barossa Valley is set in the Barossa zone of South Australia, where more than half of the country’s wine is made. Because the climate is very hot and dry, vineyard managers work diligently to ensure grapes reach the perfect levels of phenolic ripeness.
The intense heat is ideal for plush, bold reds, particularly Shiraz on its own or Rhône Blends. Often Shiraz and Cabernet partner up for plump and powerful reds.
While much less prevalent, light-skinned varieties such as Riesling, Viognier or Semillon produce vibrant Barossa Valley whites.
Most of Australia’s largest wine producers are based here and Shiraz plantings date back as far as the 1850s or before. Many of them are dry farmed and bush trained, still offering less than one ton per acre of inky, intense, purple juice.