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Villa
Maria 2009 Reserve Noble Riesling
 Some
of you would have never thought of having wine with their dessert,
others would have been told or found out that having a wine with
sweets ruins the wine, but you can buy sweeter wines, called dessert
wines, which also are sweeter and compliment the end of a meal well.
One of these is the Villa Maria Reserve Noble Riesling.
To make their Noble Riesling, Villa Maria sourced fruit from their
Fletcher Vineyard. The vineyard is located on the central valley
floor of the Wairau Valley and is characterised by free draining
alluvial soils. The vines are pruned to balance the site’s naturally
low vigour.
The fruit was encouraged to develop Botrytis early, and after
careful management was harvested late in the season after the
Botrytis has drawn mush of the moisture of the berries, ensuring the
fruit had concentrated flavours, sugars and acids when harvesting.
In 2009, the vintage encountered intermittent rain events which
maintained excellent vine vitality and caused the initial Botrytis
infection in February. From then on,. The season was warm and dry,
enabling the Botrytis to dry and concentrate the flavours and sugars
in the fruit. When it was determined to be the optimum time for
harvest which of course was late in the season, the fruit was hand
picked, with careful attention paid to separating the ideally
raisened fruit.
I found the resulting noble Riesling to have wonderfully tantalising
aromas of orange zest and apricot, with notes of ripe mango and
honeysuckle. The palate is well balanced and I found flavours of
sweet mandarin, nectarine, grapefruit, honey and dried apricot. The
flavours are incredibly intense and it is well balanced by ripe
acidity. This wine has a long lingering finish ands I found it a
great wine to round off a meal with, especially when accompanied by
sweet fruit crepes.
Noble Rieslings will cellar much longer than usual white wines, and
I would expect this one to cellar well until 2020, when with careful
cellaring it would have developed further complexity. It is a good
wine to put away now if you know of something special around that
time.
Reviewed by Stephen Clark (22/3/2010)
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