The range of sweet wines is enormous as is their
diversity. From gentle late harvest to
full-blown botrytised wines; then there’s the factor of style, from variety,
place, balance and other inputs such as maturation with wood or even controlled
flor-yeast effects, as in Takay.
SWMBO and I invited The Normal Man and I-Spy Man together,
for pre-loading, as we were heading out to a wine and food matched dinner with
Ch. d’Yquem (that’s another story). We
had the choice of many different wines, from bubbly to gently sweet. But we opted for full-on exoticism and
decadence.
The 2015 Millton
Vineyard ‘Clos Samuel’ Gisborne ‘Special Berry Selection’ Viognier was what
we happily settled on. The wine comes
from a section of the Te Arai vineyard, near the river, where the fruit is
prone to botrytis infection. And in
2015, the Viognier, left out there, got infected in a big way. James Millton instructed the pickers to
select berries properly affected and dried.
The wine is thus technically a Trockenbeerenauslese, but in typical
deprecating fashion, he’d rather say it’s closer to a Beeerenauslese.
No matter, the wine was gloriouslu decadent and
opulent. Light orange colour, and with
the subtle aromas and flavours of apricots and tropical fruits, with an overlay
of orange marmalade, unfolding caramel and toffee. Unctuous on the palate, but with enough
acidity for cut – just. And just enough
alcohol for power, drive and line. Just
a glorious exotic wine to sip on. It
flowed easily, and indeed it did gum up our palates a little. But then the stickiness cleared. When we looked back at this wine and compared
it to the five vintages of Yquem, it wasn’t out of place.
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