Château Guiraud Petit Guiraud 2012

Château Guiraud Petit Guiraud 2012

After dinner we stopped in a neighborhood wine shop enroute back to our hotel and picked up this causal sipper for an after dinner dessert wine to take back to the room. I selected a Château Guiraud Petit Guiraud 2012, a Sauternes, an appellation in France’s Bordeaux region known for some of the most celebrated sweet wines in the world. Sauternes lies within the Graves district of Bordeaux, on the banks of the Garonne River, where cool, foggy mornings and sunny afternoons play a key role in the creation of the area's acclaimed dessert wines.

Different from, but often confused with or compared to Ice Wine, Sauternes sweet dessert wines are produced by leaving the grapes on the vines to allow the beneficial mold Botrytis cinerea to affect the grapes. The Botrytis forms during the area’s damp mornings and causes the grapes to shrivel, creating sugar-laden fruit full of rich, concentrated flavors. Botrytis tends to develop late in the growing season, rewarding those vineyard growers who risk bad weather to leave the grapes on the vine. The resulting Sauternes flavor is rich and sweet, with botrytis contributing a honeyed complexity to the wine, like Ice Wine which is produced in the same way, but by leaving the grapes on the vine into the winter in cold climates.

The primary grapes of Sauternes are white grape variety Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc. This particular label is a blend of those two dominant Sauternes varietals.  This Petit label is the second label or the secondary more economical branding of the more sophisticated and renounced first or primary label, Château Guiraud which is designated a "1er Cru". The first label is naturally more complex, concentrated, expressive and or course, more expensive as to be expected, roughly twice the price.

 Château Guiraud Petit Guiraud 2012

This was straw or butter colored, medium full bodied with thick unctuous tongue coating, almost syrup of sweet 'sticky' notes of honey, hints of pineapple, apple and hints of caramel and what one wine writer referred to as chutney.

RM 89 points.

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=2102934