This was WOTN for me at a recent “Unconventional Whites” tasting downtown.
100% Muscat Alexandria, wine produced in co-operation with the Alois Kracher family. This grape variety is traditionally used in raisin production!
Poor quality natural cork, 13.5% alc, $28 Cdn wow! Rugged slate/limestone clay area.
Color. Light dull straw with green tints.
Nose. Peach, apricot, lime spice. All these aromatics are pretty soft but appeal. Some noted “grass and melon”.
Palate. Entry was dry, minerally, peach, citrus. Medium to full bodied, lengthy finish with muscat tones. I found the finish more attractive when not too chilled. Would be a perfect apperitif wine on the patio, has seen 18 month oak fermentation. Anastasia thought “mandarin… and lets go to Malaga for a holiday”.
Maybe not too obscure but hard to find I guess. Flew off the shelf after the tasting but rather expensive I thought.
Very kind, Bob. Yes, a very sweet wine can ferment very slowly, practically forever, without ever stopping, even in the bottle: Tokaji Eszencia is a case in point, but then it’s barely a wine (3% or 4% alcohol, masses of sugar). But a dry wine must ferment fully, retaining little residual sugar, before bottling. Otherwise it’ll do a re-fermentation on you. And the Botani is pretty dry.
A little anocdote on the origins of this wine: when Jorge Ordóñez invited Alois Kracher to form a joint venture with him in Jorge’s home province of Málaga, his idea was to make sweet muscats, which was the Málaga tradition - and ‘Luis’ Kracher was famed for sweet wines, of course. When Kracher traveled to southern Spain and saw those gnarled old muscat vines on steep, slate hillsides in the Málaga mountains, which provided perfect ripening conditions (no botrytis there of course - you make ‘vins de paille’, letting the grapes become raisined), he told Ordóñez: “Yes, I will do it, with one condition: I also want to make one dry wine.” And that was Botani - the first dry muscat ever made in Málaga. (‘Luis’ was sadly taken away by cancer a couple of years later. His son is now the winemaker for the Ordóñez joint venture.)
