There are not many occasions where you can break out a full bottle of dessert wine and use it up in one night. And with a great wine like Sauternes, it would be a crime to vacuum seal it and stop it, even if we can get more life out of a sweet wine instead of a dry wine.
Sauternes is lighter and more exquisite compared to other dessert wines that can sometimes be a bit more heavy, and I don't mind heavy, but that means I can drink more than one glass of Sauternes whereas I can only consume one glass of Hungarian Tokaji or PX Sherry.
Originating from the Bordeaux region, Sauternes is a wine produced with semillion and sauvignon blanc grapes and is harvested with grapes having grown a fungus called Botrytis Cinerea, or "noble rot", which raisinates the grapes and makes them more concentrated. This process happens late in September, and the success of this is dependent on not only a warm growing season, but also for the fall to be free of frost or heavy rains. Accoridng to Karen MacNeil's Wine Bible, an entire vine may only produce one glass of wine in some instances.
It is due to this very process that Chateau de Rayne Vigneau pioneered cryo-extraction in the 1980s, which The Wine Doctor describes as freezing grapes to extract water and also prevent grey rot (which would render the grapes unusable). The Hungarians were reputed to have introduced this process, which the French brought with them to the Sauternes region of Bordeaux sometime in the 17th or 18th century.
Sauternes, partly due to the painstaking process, and partly due to its location in Bordeaux and reputation, can be quite expensive. The Chateau de Rayne VIgneau set me back somewhere around $50. Its delicious notes of honey, apricot, pineapple, and lemon zest make for a fabulous wine. Moreover the price is more affordable than the very top notch Sauternes.
I picked up this bottle at a state-run Pennsylvania liquor store, but I saw that the 1967 and 1980 are carried by Flickinger Wines (which is retail wine shipping company in the South Loop, not a walk-in location).
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