Winemaker Notes
This deliciously crisp and refreshing, off-dry unoaked white wine from Germany is made from the Silvaner grape, it's juicy and packed with lots of lively fruit. Its crisp acidity and light-body are the key things to remember when pairing with food, so try to avoid very strongly flavored dishes. Recommendations: grilled freshwater trout, white asparagus with a citrus 'beurre blanc', ramps and eggs, Bratwurst or other sweetish sausage, as well as steamed clams.
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.
