Posts Tagged ‘dessert wine’

Gibson 2005 Merlot & Royal Tokaji Aszú 2006

Friday, 25 March, 2011

Royal Tokaji Aszú 2006Gibson 2005 Reserve MerlotI haven’t posted any wines for a while. I’ve had several, but just haven’t had the time to photograph and review them. But these two were standouts so I’m back to describe them.

The 2005 Reserve Merlot from Gibson is a blend of two Merlot crops, from the Adelaide Hills and Barossa Valley, both in South Australia, with a total of 15% of Cabernet Sauvignon added in, also from both locations. Apparently this is little enough that it doesn’t need to be mentioned on the front label. Anyway, we had this wine at a Thai restaurant, with grilled salmon, and a beef pad khee mao – flavourful but neither dish very spicy. From the first sip I knew this was something special. It’s very complex, bursting with layers of different flavours that it took me some time to get to grips with. Wife held the back label of the bottle secret and we tried to list some flavours. I got an aroma of raspberry – it smells very fruity and simple. But the flavour is big and round and fills the mouth, with black cherry dominant to my tongue. There’s no hint of the mint you sometimes get with Merlot, but more of a dark fruit thing, with a subtle hint of cinnamon and maybe nutmeg. A light touch of oak comes through and some light tannin. And then the most extraordinary thing happens – the aftertaste is long and lingering, and both wife and myself picked up a creamy, milky sensation. After this, we referred to the back of the bottle, which listed stone fruits, musk, cinnamon, and almond. The milkiness clicked with the almond – a definite link there. Overall it was very pleasant and interesting, and it matched the food tolerably well, so a definite success.

And ever since I started getting into wine, I’ve been keen on trying some of the more exotic sweet offerings. I’d read about Hungarian Tokaji, but had never seen any in a local shop. Then when I went to San Francisco recently, I happened on a wine shop in Burlingame, and browsed around. When I spotted this bottle of Tokaji, I had to buy it. It survived the trip home in my luggage, and we cracked it the other day after dinner. It’s really different to any other dessert wine I’ve tried. Most are sweet, tending to syrupy, with orange and marmalade notes dominating. This one is much more tropical in outlook, with a bright golden yellow colour, and a thin-ness that is far from syrupy in the glass. It smells fresh and clean, fruity, with perhaps a hint of freshly cut grass. The taste is liquid sunshine, with pineapple coming through strongly, and hints of kiwifruit and lime. There’s a minerally, chemically mid-taste, slightly reminiscent of Riesling. Some dessert wines retain residual fermentation fizz, but there’s absolutely none here. The aftertaste is smooth and lingering, tending towards banana. It’s totally different to any other dessert wine I’ve tried, and very nice. I must keep an eye out for more.

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Inniskillin 2006 Riesling Icewine

Monday, 3 January, 2011

Inniskillin 2006 Riesling IcewineInniskillin is a Canadian winery, which makes one of the most acclaimed icewines in the world. These are sweet dessert wines produced from grapes that freeze on the vine late in the harvest season with the first frosts of winter. The freezing removes water and concentrates the sugars, allowing deliciously sweet wines to be made without further processing.

I’ve reviewed one icewine before, and I’ve tried another once at a wine festival in the German town of Bingen, on the Rhine River (boast, moi?). Both were absolutely delicious. So when I saw this bottle of Inniskillin Riesling Icewine in a local bottle shop, I was immediately attracted to it. Alas, the price tag was around $115, for 375 ml. I held out for a couple of visits, while I read up on Inniskillin online. Everything I found said that these were the pinnacle of icewines. And then I got a 20% discount voucher for the bottle shop, and went in one day to pick up some bottles of other things. While there, I asked the guy about the Inniskillin. He said that they were lucky to have that one bottle in stock – they rarely get them in, as the number of bottles imported to Australia is so few. Given that, I took the plunge and grabbed it, not knowing when I might get the chance to acquire a bottle again.

We opened it on New Year’s Eve, after a quiet dinner at home, relaxing into an evening of TV, and had it with a platter of cheeses. The colour is, as you can see from the photo, a rich, dark gold – darker than any other dessert wine I’ve had. The aroma was fresh and vibrant, with oranges the dominant note. It was slightly thick and syrupy. On the tongue it was sweet, with flavours of orange and marmalade, with a touch of acidity to cut into the sweetness, something like lime. It was nicely balanced, but very sweet, and… disappointingly simple. I was expecting layers of complex flavours developing in the mouth, but there wasn’t much of that going on. There was a hint of Riesling minerality underneath it all, and that slight piercing note in the aroma, but the fruit flavour and sweetness were basically straightforward.

M. put it best when she said it reminded her of Noble One, the benchmark Australian dessert wine, a botrytis Semillon by De Bortoli, and one which we’ve had several times. It’s true – it tasted almost exactly like Noble One. The same orange dominance with a bittersweet marmalade finish and lingering taste. While this is very nice (I love Noble One), it wasn’t what I was hoping for in an internationally acclaimed wine that cost nearly 3 times as much.

So… Inniskillin Riesling Icewine. Good, but not that good. Inniskillin also makes icewine from Vidal, Cabernet Franc, and Tempranillo, so I might try one of those at some point (if I can find any).

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Cloudy Bay 2004 Late Harvest Riesling

Friday, 13 August, 2010

Cloudy Bay 2004 Late Harvest RieslingWe wanted a sweet wine for dessert last weekend and spotted this in a shop. It wasn’t cheap, but I was keen to try it. Cloudy Bay is a famous New Zealand winery, in the Marlborough region, best known for its world-famous Sauvignon blanc.

I’ve tried some Riesling before and it has, in my mind, a very distinct aroma. I noticed it as soon as I sniffed a glass of this one. It was citrusy, with lime the dominant fruit. And that distinctive smell of Riesling… I don’t know how else to describe it – it doesn’t remind me of anything else in the world. Sort of sweetish, minerally like a handful of wet gravel, and also fragrant like alpine wildflowers, with a piercing quality of fresh cold air, perhaps a tiny bit like bleach, although not unpleasant. Overall it’s a positive aroma, but hard to describe without rifling my aroma vocabulary for unusual descriptors.

The flavour was sweet and citrusy, tangy with acidity, and a slight hint of spiciness, like an apple strudel made with tangy green apples and just a faint touch of cinnamon. It wasn’t syrupy sweet, and in fact the sweetness was so restrained that M. declared it didn’t taste to her like a dessert wine at all. It was in the continuum between the ever so slightly sweet Gewürztraminer we had a while back and a full-on dessert wine. I could actually see having this one with a meal of fish, rather than dessert. I actually had it with cheese and a fresh pear, which matched nicely – I don’t think it would have worked with a chocolate cake.

I look forward to seeing if the next Riesling I have also has that unmistakeable “Riesling” aroma – if it’s indeed a constant then I can confidently say that I could pick Riesling out of a line-up of white wines without any trouble at all. I only hope at some point I start to get a similar feel for reds. The next week should help, as we’re taking a vacation trip to Western Australia, and spending a few days in the Margaret River wine region there, so should be dropping in on a few wineries.

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Wine three-for-one

Sunday, 25 July, 2010

De Bortoli "Sacred Hill" 2009 Traminer RieslingGramp's 2006 Botrytis SemillonDisaster Bay Hot Chili WineA triple wine post this time. Although purists would not regard the first offering as a “wine” – it’s made not from grapes, but from hot chilli peppers. That’s right, 100% chilli juice, pressed and fermented into a liqueur style drink, by Disaster Bay Chillies. I found this in a wine shop in Katoomba and the owner let me have a taste – wowee. It’s sweet and delicious, developing into a hot red chilli flavour that last and lasts and lasts. You don’t want a lot at once, but you do want more later on. I instantly bought a bottle and took it to a games night with some friends to share it around. Their opinion was mixed, with some not enjoying it, and others really liking it. I’m in the latter camp. The bottle says it lasts for months in the fridge, which is a good thing, because you don’t want more than half a shot glass at a time. But when it runs out, I’ll be buying another somewhere.

Next cab off the rank is Gramp’s botrytis semillon dessert wine. We’ve actually run out of sweet wines in our modest “cellar” (a box in the garage), so wanted to pick up something to go with cheese and crackers. This boasted some medals and wasn’t expensive, so we plumped for it. It’s thick and syrupy, and very sweet, without that hint of acidity to balance it out. The flavour is what I’ve begun to think of as typical for botrytis wines, of orange marmalade, but again without any of the subtle nuances of other flavours in there to give it complexity. M. didn’t like it much, but I thought it was passable with the cheese.

Today’s final offering is De Bortoli “Sacred Hill” 2009 Traminer Riseling, a blend of gewürztraminer and riesling to make a semi-sweet and spicy style of white wine. We found this in a bottle shop for a paltry $8.99 and I figured, “What the heck?” We had this over two nights, first with fish, then with Indian curries. I thought it was fine with both, showing the pickly spiciness of the previous gewürztraminer we tried. M. didn’t like it as much, stating it lacked the lemony citric notes that balanced the Stonecroft, and was a shade sweeter. True, it was as she described, but frankly I was hard pressed to notice the difference myself from memory. I think I’d need a side-by-side tasting to tell them apart. At any rate, I enjoyed this, and for the price I wouldn’t be shy of picking up more of this one.

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Ata Rangi Pinot Noir and Mountain Ice Icewine

Wednesday, 14 July, 2010

Crimson Pinot NoirMountain Ice 2009 Viognier/Chardonnay IcewineAnother two-for-one wine post. The Pinot Noir is by Ata Rangi in Martinborough, New Zealand, vintage 2008. I really liked the previous Pinot Noir I had, so it was good to try a different one. We took this bottle to a local pizza restaurant. The colour is a striking transparent crimson red. The aroma I didn’t get a good handle on I’m afraid – it was mostly a heady alcoholic smell, with nothing else I could really recognise apart from the usual “red wine” smell. The taste, however, was a triple-layered development of flavours. At first it was very dry and mild, and both M. and I detected the slight prickle of fermentation. I understand this is usually considered a fault in red wines, but pinot noir seems light enough that it doesn’t seem astray. The overall effect was quite un-wine-like, with almost a chalky feel to it. In fact, it reminded me of the taste of a soluble aspirin. But after a few seconds, the flavour developed into a pleasant fruity number, mostly reminiscent of raspberries. Leaving it sit in the mouth for a while longer started to bring out some mild tannin. Overall I’d say I was happy with it, but perhaps not as nice as the previous pinot.

Today’s second wine is an icewine I bought on our recent day trip to the Blue Mountains. It’s from Orange Mountain Winery, near Orange in inland New South Wales. They freeze the Viognier and Chardonnay grapes artificially to concentrate the sugar for this sweet dessert wine. A sticker on the bottle says it won “Best Icewine” at the 2009 International Sweet Wine Challenge. It’s a gorgeous luminous pale straw yellow in colour. The smell is of citrus fruits, with orange and lemon coming out. But the taste is very different, being strong tropical fruits – passionfruit and pineapple, with a touch of orange. And it’s exceedingly sweet – possibly the sweetest wine I’ve ever tasted; I certainly can’t recall a sweeter one. All of which make it delicious and more-ish. I want to see if I can find more of this one! We had this at home with a platter of brie, jarlsberg, and a cream cheese with apricot and almond in it, on crackers. What better dessert could you want?

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