Flaming heck this is good. Sure I bias towards desert wine, love it. There are poor ones and stonkingly fabulous ones, but what is this like?
Aromas of butterscotch and apricots with honey notes you get a sense that this is a fine desert wine. Additional flavours of pineapple, citrus and freshness follow. Its not sticky but there is a presence, quite balanced with sweetness, flavour and acidity.
International Wine and Spirits Challenge gave Bertons a gold medal and they are spot on, truly excellent. Aldi have got this wine spot on at £6 a half bottle, excellent value.
Berton, Botrytis Semillon, Murrumbidgee River, Australia
Desert wine, its a marmite wine this, you either love it or hate it. The main issue I have is by the time desert is served you’ve had a few wines and think, its it worth opening another different wine?
Its got a beautiful rich lemon colour. There’s lots of ripe citrus, pineapple, lychee on the nose and taste. it has 100g of sugar, a dry wine has 5 or 10g as a comparison, but the acidity and sweetness balance is excellent. Its not a sticky desert wine but fresh and light. I liked it on its own but cheese and crackers at the end of the evening would be a great pairing.
At £6 a half bottle its great value.
Vistamar, Late Harvest, Moscatel 2017, Limari Valley, Chile
Desert Wine, this is a desert wine in a full size bottle, its christmas and all things seem good by the end of this bottle. I like desert wine very much, just sipping it, tasting all those rich flavours.
This has aromas of ripe pineapple, lychee and and heavy thick texture that helps those flavours which are added to by condensed citrus and honey.
This is a little lighter than you may get from a traditional desert wine buts its really rather good and at under £10 a bottle, great value.
Bouvet Ladubay, Coteaux Du Layon 2013, Loire Valley, France
I do like a half decent desert wine. Fortunately this is one of them.
It’s a light, fruit driven wine with aromas of honey and stone fruit that’s been baked. There a additional flavours of raisins and a nuttiness in the background. It’s the lightness I really like especially with the cooked fruit and ice-cream that we had with it. This got a couple of silver medals and it’s well deserved.
I am a fan of desert wines, sip on their own or have with, well desert, they give that warm, sweet happy feeling. I accept that those feelings could be caused by all the other alcohol drunk earlier in the evening.
Thereare a few excellent desert wines coming from Australia and New Zealand, the Ned, D’arenberg and De Bortoli, who produced a Decanter gold medal winner under the Tesco Finest label a few years ago.
This Sauvignon Blanc from Waihopai Valley is similar to D’arenberg’s Stump Jump Sticky Chardonnay. The grapes have been allowed to hang on the vine for longer allowing them to really ripen and suffer from Botrytis for extra sweetness. There are aromas and flavours of honey, citrus and apricot. The acidity is high but is wonderfully balanced, never drink too much, just sip and enjoy. At £16 for 500ml its very good value.
Each year we invite a few winemakers and people in the wine industry for a bit of food, drink.and possibly intelligent conversation, or at least conversation! In past years this has included people from the Decanter magazine, winemakers and wine sellers. Usually we have some English wine, unusual wine, weird wine and crackingly good wine. This evening was no different. Above are the wines drunk. For food we had tapas style food, breads, pates, fish, meat and cheese selections.
Going from left to right we started with Mexican sparkling wine made with Macabeu (a spanish grape), Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc. A little sweet for my taste but more of the Macabeu grape character coming through. It got a bronze medal at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Next was Bethnal Bubbles from a winery in Bethnal Green, east end of London. Some said weird, I said “oooohhhhh, it’s weird” unfiltered sparkling with a hoppy taste and green apple notes. At £23 a bottle it’s a good party conversation piece but not one I’ll get.
Then we went through some English white wines, light and fruity with lots of citrus. The Toppesfield vineyard 2018 Bacchus was excellent, I tried it just after bottling and thought they over extracted, a few months on and the wine is tasting much better with much more fruit. The Ashdown Estate from Bluebell vineyard white was lighter but very drinkable.
The Alsace Schlumberger Grand Cru 2014 Riesling. Full rich flavours of citrus, peach, lychee and a smell of petroleum, magnificent. Burnt Foot Pinot Noir rose followed. Good red fruit flavours and one of the better Pinot Noir wines from the UK.
Next was King Coel red, 20 year old English red that tasted fresh and had vibrant red fruit flavours. For me the highlight as it was under the winemakers stairs for much of that time, please see the blog for a write up. The Potash vineyard red was only 7 years old! but had lost some of its fruit flavours, drinkable but one wine to slip and not knock back, so to enjoy the flavours. A South Africa red followed, Lemberg-Louis 2016 made with Shiraz, Mourvedre and Granache, richer red fruit flavours with black cherry and higher tannins, excellent with the meat course.
The last wines were 2 late bottle vintage ports, grahams 2005 and Quinta Sta Eufemia 2019, both excellent ruby ports with rich fruit and smooth finish were drunk with the cheese course and on their own and finally we had a Czech desert wine, Pechor Vinarstvi 2015 Ryzlink Rynsky, light and full of citrus flavour.
The next afternoon the ones that stayed and had a midd BBQ felt the long night!
Asda won a gold medal for its very cheap, £5.25, Romanian Wine Atlas Fetească Regală at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards, so Romania can produce excellent wine. The bottle states aromas of dried apricots and beeswax and flavours of raisins and almonds. A wine made with noble rot, that can age and has unique style. Aromas are off with the bees, flavours as big as a bee and sweetness the size of Mount Olympus. You just get sweetness. Passable with a Chinese takeaway but avoid is the best I can say.
Argentina desert wine can be extremely delish. Salta in the north is the the home Torrontes and this is a fine example of what is produced by a first class outfit. There are aromas of peach, melon and honey. The same comes through in the taste although more melon and honey.
