Winemaker Notes
A marked character to orangette in nose that stands above anything else. As this aroma dissipates, scents of high roast coffee and liquorice root appear with a finish of caramel. Very balanced. Let the wine roll in mouth and it will gradually uncover to your taste buds. Balsamic, concentrated in liquorice. Perfect harmony of mint and camphor, as dense as honey and raisins. A proud representative of complexity.
Served cold in liqueur glass. No time limit for wine storage and it improves with age even in opened bottle. Store in a cool, dry place away from light and direct heat. It can be sipped as a dessert itself, and it is the perfect match for mocha cakes, tiramisu, vanilla ice-cream or nougat candy. You can't go wrong with blue cheese or foie either!
Professional Ratings
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
It has a nose and palate of chocolate-covered candied orange, spices, molasses. I'd say the dominant aromas in the nose are dark chocolate. It's very dense, developing notes of very concentrated licorice and balsamic, mint, camphor and evolving notes of petrol with time. Complex, rare and unique.
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.
Montilla-Moriles is a DO wine zone in Andalucia, in southern Spain, just south of Córdoba city but inland from the coast. Historically the wines of Montilla-Moriles made their way into the sherries made in Jerez. But once it was awarded DO status in 1945, Montilla-Moriles began to establish its own identity. The chalky and sandy soils combined with extremely hot temperatures are best to produce Pedro Ximénez, which accounts for nearly three quarters of the region’s production, some of which is still legally sold to Jerez and Málaga producers. The unique conditions of Montilla-Moriles allow for Pedro Ximénez to be bottled also in the Vinos Dulces Naturales (naturally sweet) style, a non-fortified style for which the region is recognized.
Muscat and Lairén are also produced for blending. Palomino is not suited to the extreme conditions of the area.
The basic types of Montilla-Moriles DO wines include young fruity wines, aged (crianza) wines, and generosos, which are aged in a solera system similar to those in Jerez. The resulting styles of generosos, simply known as, Montilla, while similar to sherry, perhaps display a bit less finesse given they are aged away from the cooling effects of the Atlantic.