Rieussec 2020 (750ML)

95 WI / 95 WI / 94 FS / 92-94 VM

The 2020 Rieussec has a pale lemon-straw color. It offers up vibrant, gregarious notes of fresh pineapple, juicy apricots, and spiced pears, leading to suggestions of allspice, orange blossom, and almond tart. The palate is lively and intense, with a gorgeous satiny texture and a crisp line lifting the hedonic fruit to a long finish. - Lisa Perrotti-Brown, Wine Independent

The 2020 Rieussec emerges from a very challenging year marked by an early harvest and just one small window in September with the requisite amount of botrytis in the field. Lemon confit, marzipan, tangerine oil and white flowers are all beautifully woven together in a mid-weight, gracious Rieussec that is all class. Residual sugar is 120 grams per liter, but is not especially evident. Production will be around 10,000 bottles, in other words, a fraction of what is typical here. - Antonio Galloni, Vinous Media

"Given some of the vintage’s extreme challenges, I was surprised by how good some of Bordeaux’s sweet whites turned out to be, but [2020] wasn’t an easy vintage. Indeed, those who took that gamble and weathered the storm, so to speak, went on to produce some surprisingly impressive sweet wines, demonstrating a good amount of botrytic character, if not as concentrated and rich as more consistently great vintages. This said, I actually like the generally lighter, fresher styles of the most successful 2020 sweets, which still maintain a lot of layers and unmistakable signatures. For this reason, I believe this is a vintage that Bordeaux lovers who do necessarily gravitate toward big, rich, sweet wines are going to want to seek out. These are wines with serious drinkability, which should give a lot of pleasure within just a few years of cellaring, and yet have the intensity and harmony to cellar a good few decades in the best cases.” - Lisa Perrotti-Brown