Rutherglen Muscat

Rutherglen Muscat is made in a small, hot, inland corner of north-east Victoria, and it is one of the few wine styles that Australia can claim as genuinely its own. The grape is Muscat à Petits Grains Rouges — the red-berried version of the Muscat family, a mutation of the white Muscat Blanc rather than the same vine.

The fruit is left on the vine well past ripeness until it raisins in the summer heat, then picked, fermented briefly and fortified with grape spirit. The young wine goes into old oak casks, which are stored not in a cool cellar but in sheds and lofts where Rutherglen's ferocious summer temperatures accelerate the ageing — a deliberate echo of the Madeira method, arrived at by climate rather than by design.

The wines are then blended through a solera-style system that draws from casks of wildly different ages, some of them over a century old. The classification runs Rutherglen, Classic, Grand and Rare, in ascending order of average age and concentration, and the top tier can average several decades in wood.

The flavour is unlike anything else: raisin, toffee, malt, cold tea, orange marmalade and a distinct note of the Muscat grape's own floral perfume persisting through all of it. The texture is thick, almost oily, and the finish is very long with a clean acid lift that keeps it from becoming syrupy.

A Rare Rutherglen Muscat is dark brown, barely pourable, and among the most concentrated wines made anywhere. Very small quantities are produced by a handful of long-established family firms.