Chateau Suduiraut Sauternes 2016
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This wine is hand crafted at every stage of its elaboration and reveals remarkable finesse and complexity and a golden color reminiscent of the sun that made it possible. With age the bright gold evolves to a dark amber color. It has extensive life span. This wine powerfully and harmoniously combines fruit and floral aromas with roasted and candied notes. The superlative elegance of the wine comes from a match of total opposites (a voluptuous texture, mineral freshness and the heat of spices). Château Suduiraut is designed for all those who enjoy sensory and emotional experiences that are botch rich and full of surprises and leave a lasting memory.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a dense wine, full of rich fruit, bitter orange and apricot. Its ripe fruit is balanced by the intense botrytis while it is also freshened by the wine's acidity. This is a great wine with a long-term future.
Barrel Sample: 95–97 Points -
James Suckling
A very concentrated Sauternes with a cornucopia of dried papaya, pineapple and mango, plus candied orange and tropical flowers that bowl you over. Although it stays in the background, there’s great acidity in this wine that keeps it very straight and clean, in spite of the luscious extravagance. Bright, citrusy finish. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Pale lemon in color, the 2016 Suduiraut rocks up out of the glass with notes of honey-drizzled peaches, lime cordial and orange oil plus wafts of lanolin, pie crust and crushed rocks. The palate packs a wallop with intense flavor layers and a gorgeous texture, finishing with fantastic freshness.
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Jeb Dunnuck
As to the Sauternes, the 2016 Château Suduiraut boasts a medium gold color and a fresh, clean, beautifully perfumed bouquet of orange blossom, honeyed pineapple, and flowers, with notable botrytis, which can be lacking in a number of Sauternes in 2016. With moderate acidity, a fleshy, full-bodied texture, and loads of fruits, it’s geared more toward drinking over the coming 10-15 years than any over-the-top cellaring.
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Wine Spectator
This is a powerful style, with a mix of creamed pear, fig, papaya and persimmon flavors liberally laced with crème brûlée and orange blossom honey notes, through a ginger-tinged finish. In line with the vintage's forward persona, but this has notably more breadth and depth than most of its peers. Best from 2023 through 2038.
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Château Suduiraut is acknowledged to be one of the finest Sauternes. The team at the Suduiraut estate, passionate about their work are united in the pursuit of their goal : to extract from this great vineyard one of the world's finest wines.
The history of Château Suduiraut, in Sauternes, goes back to centuries. After the total destruction of the property by the Duke d’Epernon in the 1600’s, Count Blaise de Suduiraut replanted the vineyard and restored the estate to its former glory. On 18 April 1855 the estate was classed as a Premier Cru during the official wine classification programme in the Gironde winegrowing area. AXA Millésimes acquired Suduiraut in 1992 with the aim of preserving and perpetuating the estate's remarkable tradition of vineyard management and winemaking. Inspired by the great Suduiraut wines of the past, the new management has enabled this great vineyard to fulfill its full potential in recent years.
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.
Sweet and unctuous but delightfully charming, the finest Sauternes typically express flavors of exotic dried tropical fruit, candied apricot, dried citrus peel, honey or ginger and a zesty beam of acidity.
Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris and Muscadelle are the grapes of Sauternes. But Sémillon's susceptibility to the requisite noble rot makes it the main variety and contributor to what makes Sauternes so unique. As a result, most Sauternes estates are planted to about 80% Sémillon. Sauvignon is prized for its balancing acidity and Muscadelle adds aromatic complexity to the blend with Sémillon.
Botrytis cinerea or “noble rot” is a fungus that grows on grapes only in specific conditions and its onset is crucial to the development of the most stunning of sweet wines.
In the fall, evening mists develop along the Garonne River, and settle into the small Sauternes district, creeping into the vineyards and sitting low until late morning. The next day, the sun has a chance to burn the moisture away, drying the grapes and concentrating their sugars and phenolic qualities. What distinguishes a fine Sauternes from a normal one is the producer’s willingness to wait and tend to the delicate botrytis-infected grapes through the end of the season.