2019 Chateau Fontaine Sauternes

Winemaker Notes:  Creamy and silky dessert wine with ripe peach, apricot flavors with bright balanced acidity. Serve chilled and with creamy blue cheeses or custard fruit flans.

Manually harvested, a painstaking process of multiple passes through the vines is necessary to ensure picking each berry at just the right moment, when the Botrytis Cinerea fungus has established but before it destroys the fruit. Naturally sweet, the botrytis concentrates the flavors and the richness, giving the wine a lush and honeyed character. Since botrytis naturally dehydrates the grapes, production is extremely small, less than half of a vineyard's normal yield. Grapes are pressed and the juice is fermented in stainless steel at 20°C followed by 12 months in French oak barrels. 90% Semillon, 5% Sauvignon Blanc, 5% Muscadelle.

Chateau Fontaine Sauternes is a small vineyard of 4 hectacres in the commune of Fargues in the heart of the Sauternes appellation. It has been owned by Muriel and Jean-Noel Belloc since 2008. The vines are planted on a gravel outcropping with clay/limestone subsoil. This gravelly hillock was once the site of an ancient river bed millions of years ago. The average age of the vines is 30 years old.