Winemaker Notes
Morillon Trockenbeerenauslese shows a heady and intense aroma of apple pastry, vanilla, cinnamon, and preserved lemons. The flavor is incredibly rich and sweet but balanced by racy acidity that results in a wine that is simultaneously sweet and vibrant. This is a wine with an aging potential of twenty years or more.
Trockenbeerenauslese or TBA is a rare and incredibly laborious wine to produce and is for many a “Meditationswein” often consumed without the accompaniment of food. Pungent cheeses such as blue or aged washed rind cheeses make an excellent contrast to the sweetness of TBA while sweet dishes featuring dried fruits, caramel, or nuts make the best dessert pairings.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A hint of sublimely ripe apricot on the nose draws you in. The aromatic allure continues on the palate, where a gently bitter edge, as of dark fir honey, streaks the gentle notes of fresh and baked apricot. There is a rounded, luscious, almost emollient fluidity that makes this glide across the pleasure centers of your brain, always following with lip-smacking freshness. This leaves sinuous trails across the tongue and brain. Drink until 2040, at least.
Cellar Selection -
Wine & Spirits
This is an intensely sweet take on morillon. Vinified entirely in stainless steel, it tastes of pure fruit robed in clear caramel, like the apples in a tarte tatin. The spice of the grape skins adds a relieving touch of savor to the sweetness, and the acidity brings the wine to a clean finish. At 211 grams per liter of residual sugar, it’s intense stuff but not cloying, ready for a cheese plate.
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.
Appreciated for superior wines made from indigenous varieties, Austria should be on the radar of any curious wine drinker. A rather cool and dry wine growing region, this country produces wine that is quintessentially European in style: food-friendly with racy acidity, moderate alcohol and fresh fruit flavors.
Austria’s viticultural history is rich and vast, dating back to Celtic tribes with first written record of winemaking starting with the Romans. But the 20th century brought Austria a series of winemaking obstacles, namely the plunder of both world wars, as well as its own self-imposed quality breach. In the mid 1980s, after a handful of shameless vintners were found to have added diethylene glycol (a toxic substance) to their sweet wines to imitate the unctuous qualities imparted by botrytis, Austria’s credibility as a wine-producing country was compromised. While no one was harmed, the incident forced the country to rebound and recover stronger than ever. By the 1990s, Austria was back on the playing field with exports and today is prized globally for its quality standards and dedication to purity and excellence.
Grüner Veltliner, known for its racy acidity and herbal, peppery aromatics, is Austria's most important white variety, comprising nearly a third of Austrian plantings. Riesling in Austria is high in quality but not quantity, planted on less than 5% of the country’s vineyard land. Austrian Rieslings are almost always dry and are full of bright citrus flavors and good acidity. Red varietal wines include the tart and peppery Zweigelt, spicy and dense Blaufränkisch and juicy Saint Laurent. These red varieties are also sometimes blended.