AceHighWine

“When it rains, it pours.”

Or so the old saying goes. At the moment, Perth is enjoying a healthy downpour of rain which is no doubt great news for the dams, both directly in terms of filling ‘em up and indirectly in terms of people turning off their sprinklers while Mother Nature puts her hose on the garden.

Wet weather is also great for hearty winter fare, say peppery medium-rare roast beef. With shiraz and cabernet. And friends. And is as customary when you’re entertaining, you need a nice sweet drop to sign off on the night…

Heady and intoxicating aromas of marmalade, apricot jam, passionfruit that also continue on to the palate. Luscious and rich but tempered by enough refreshing acidity to perish any thought of the word ‘cloying’. Succulent streamers of citrus unravel themselves through the super-long finish that moves slowly throughout the mouth. It’s a big call, but this is the best recent release sticky I can remember tasting under the d’Arenberg label - perhaps any Australian wine label. As an added bonus, this wine is sealed under screwcap, meaning you get the wine just as fresh as the Osborns intended. A great match with the strawberry and custard tart our friends Zoë and Kim brought around for dessert. Outrageous value considering the quality you’re getting for your dollar. 18.5/20

Recently I had an opportunity to look at a whole range of dessert wines for an article for Homes & Living magazine: good fun as, with the exception of the fortifieds tasting for Quaff which always unearths some hugely undervalued gems, it’s not often I get to look at a line-up of end-of-dinner drinks.

Most wine drinkers will be familar with De Bortoli’s iconic Noble One which many place at the top of the Australian dessert and fortified wine hierachy, but flying slightly lower on the radar is the Vat 5 Semillon, produced as part of De Bortoli’s fantastic value Deen De Bortoli range. And like its brethren, the Vat 8 Shiraz and Vat 9 Cabernet, the Vat 5 really over-delivers on quality for its humble asking price.

De Bortoli Vat 5 Botrytis Semillon 2004 ($12 - 375ml bottle)
It’s a mystery to me how De Bortoli can produce a wine of this quality at the price they do, but as the old saying goes - I’m not going to be peering into any gift horses’ mouths any time soon. This smells as it should with buckets of passionfruit and honeyed apricots on the nose and it tastes as any good dessert wine should too: sweet, luscious but blessed with a terrific juiciness to really carry those appealing marmalade and passionfruit flavours that linger on the palate. There’s great balance between the wine’s sweetness and acidity so you don’t get that cloying feeling that blemishes lesser dessert wines. Very, very good drinking at the price and well worth seeking out. Get a half bottle for your next dinner party and prepare yourself for a barrage of kudos on your choice of dessert wine. Then let everyone know how much you paid for the bottle and get ready to look really smart. Which of course all AceHighWine readers are…

De Bortoli Noble One 2004 ($37)
The king of Australian stickies and benchmark that all other dessert wines are judged against. While aged Noble One lends itself to a variety of other food-matching assignments, most of us will enjoy it towards the final stages of a meal, though admittedly, I’d probably have better luck holding onto bottles if: (a) I had more of them and (b) they weren’t so awesome as youngsters. To smell, the ‘04 vintage of Noble One is rich and intense and has me dreaming of flakey, buttery pastry. This intensity and power translates on to the palate with a lot more of those citrus characters on the nose asserting themselves in the mouth - be on the look-out for some well-defined marmalade characters. Compared to previous vintages, it’s a more elegant style and while it might not be as complex in the mouth, the finish is deliciously multi-dimensional as nuances of peach, marmalade and butterscotch mixed with a hint of nuttiness take turns washing over the back palate. www.debortoli.com.au

Wine can be pretentious, so it’s refreshing to taste wine that is pretension-free: unassuming drops that don’t pretend to be anything they’re not. Something like this very different wine. This isn’t the kind of drop that you’ll find sharing cellar space with first growth Burgundy or cases of Alsace riesling. Nor is it the kind of drink I thought I’d ever recommend on AceHighWine (I’ll have to scull half a bottle of good old fashioned Aussie claret to get the testosterone levels back up to acceptable levels after this), but in the right circumstances and with some creative food matching, the Killawarra Dusk Strawberry comes into its own. As I noted in my tasting note, this is “lolly water for grown ups”. The wine smells just like homemade strawberry jam bubbling away on the stove – little surprise considering there’s a subtle berry infusion to give this wine its flavour injection. And yes, it is a sweet wine and I doubt many guys would be seen drinking much of this as the brand’s marketing is aimed squarely at the fairer sex, particularly the funky chick-like website. So ladies, if you’re planning some kind of “pink” party, looking for a fun drink to share with friends or even looking for an alcoholic match for Devonshire tea, you won’t find too many candidates more suited to the job than this. www.killawarra.com.au

Although every region boasts its own champions of the style, De Bortoli’s honey-and-dried-apricot masterpiece, Noble One, is widely – and rightfully – regarded as Australia’s greatest sweet white wine and the 2003 release continues this wine’s long and proud lineage. Luscious, rich, satisfying and not at all cloying; bringing a half bottle (375ml. $24) of this wine to the next dinner party you attend will ensure repeat invites to future evenings, but great hosts will splash out on a full bottle (750ml, $45) for guests at their own soiree. Noble by name, noble by nature (incidentally, the noble refers to the botryitis - aka noble rot - which gives this wine its intense concentrated flavours) www.debortoli.com.au