Posts Tagged ‘botrytis’

Southern Highland Wines 2008 Botrytis Semillon

Sunday, 9 May, 2010

Southern Highlands Wines 2008 Botrytis Semillon
Another dessert wine. A few weeks ago we went on a day trip down to Berrima, a historic town on the old highway south from Sydney to Canberra and Melbourne. I remember having to drive through it on the way to Canberra many years ago and it was a nice place to stop for a morning tea of scones and cream. It’s since been bypassed and has reverted to a sleepy little village, but retains many charming features and has the usual sort of mix of antiques, crafts, art galleries, restaurants, and cafes to attract travellers and day-trippers.

As we discovered on this recent trip, it also has a wine shop, specialising in wines local to the southern highlands region of New South Wales. I hadn’t even realised that this was a wine growing region! They cover a scattered area ranging from about Bowral through to Canberra. Being highlands, they are high altitude, cool climate wineries, very different from the classic Australian hot and dry climate wine regions. I don’t know much about them, but presumably they grow stuff like sauvignon blanc and pinot noir. I’ll have to look into them a bit more closely over time.

Anyway, being a sucker for dessert wines, I picked up this bottle of Southern Highland Wines 2008 Botrytis Semillon. It’s very interesting to compare it to the other botrytised wines we’ve had recently. My wife really didn’t like this one as much, whereas I didn’t see much difference at first. It has an orangey aroma and taste, leading into the slight bitterness of marmalade. I quite liked it.

But a second glass brought out the differences. The previous couple of sweet wines we’ve drunk had a tingly prickle of fermentation on the tongue, whereas this one has none whatsoever. It’s a beautiful golden yellow colour, and thick and syrupy and sweet. Really not as much of that balancing marmaladey bitterness. And… simple for that. Not as complex and full of interesting flavours as the Tamburlaine Botrytis Chardonnay, nor particularly the McLeish Estate Jessica’s Botrytis Semillon.

I still like it – I have a real thing for these sweet dessert wines. But I like those other two more.

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Tamburlaine 2008 Noble Chardonnay

Saturday, 3 April, 2010

Tamburlaine 2008 Noble Chardonnay
Tamburlaine is a certified organic winery in the Hunter Valley. On my trip to the Hunter Valley last year, I popped into this winery because they advertised winery tours, and I was interested to see some of the wine-making process. The tour was indeed very interesting, with a guy who was obviously keen on the whole organic side of the process, showing us the water and organic waste recycling processes used in the vineyard. We got to sample some still-fermenting white wine direct form one of the vats – the guide just opened a spigot at the bottom of a huge vat and let the juice pour into our hands. And there was a very cool fully-equipped chemistry lab, where they do all sorts of chemical analysis of the wines.

After the tour, I bought a bottle of this botrytis chardonnay dessert wine from the winery shop.

It’s sweet and jammy, beginning with apricot flavour, with a hint of banana. It develops into an orange taste, with the same bitterness of peel as the Jessica’s botrytis semillon we had last week. I found a good description for it on a wine site: orange marmalade – that mixture of sweet and bitter orange flavours that you get from really good marmalade. This wine also has a bit of that nutty, almost oaky kick that you’d expect from a chardonnay compared to a semillon, so it’s a bit heavier than a botrytis semillon. Very slight prickle of fermentation. Nice, but I think I prefer the semillon style.

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Jessica’s Botrytis Semillon 2008, McLeish Estate

Saturday, 27 March, 2010

Wine & Cheese
Last year we went away for a long weekend in the Hunter Valley. It’s one of Australia’s great wine regions, and only a couple of hour’s drive from home. One of the wineries there is McLeish Estate, which is owned by a friend’s uncle. So of course we popped in for a look around and to taste some of the wines. I bought a bottle of shiraz for a gift and a bottle of this – Jessica’s Botrytis Semillon dessert wine.

Sweet dessert wines are one of my favourite things, even before I started this recent discovery of wine. We tasted this one at the end of our trip, after tasting a bunch of other wines – dry and sweet – and I recall being somewhat unimpressed, but perhaps it was just a jaded palate by that stage.

Trying it again now, it’s a delicious syrupy wine, honey sweet with a tang of oranges and a slight prickliness of fermentation. I think I detected a hint of peach in there too. As it swirls in the mouth, a balanced bitterness of orange peel comes out – not a bad thing at all, since it nicely complements the intense beginning sweetness, toning it down. Think the elegant sophistication of dark chocolate as opposed to the simple sweetness of milk chocolate.

We had it with a selection of cheeses, crackers, and sliced pear. Yum!

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