Botrytis-affected wines

I got an email from a reader this morning asking about botrytis-affected wines.

Botrytis is known as "noble rot" because it can infect grapes destined for dessert wines, creating a fascinating spicy effect.

Botrytis can occur naturally, or vineyards can be inoculated (as happens most notably in California and Australia. Perhaps the most famous and expensive botrytis-affected wines in the world are the Sauternes of Bordeaux.

In the Pacific Northwest, a few wines will be released each year that are botrytis affected. The most memorable I've tasted is from Bainbridge Island Vineyards & Winery, which is a 30-minute ferry ride west of Seattle. Each year, it crafts a botrytis-affected dessert wine from the rare Austrian grape Siegerrebe.

What other botrytis-affected wines have you tasted from the Pacific Northwest.

Botrytis

Blackwood Canyon, in Benton City, WA, historically has produced some nice (but expensive) botrytic dessert wines. But of course, there are a lot of things fungally affected out there...

Inoculating Bot Sem

Hi Andy,

I am pretty sure when I was studying at WSU the research scientists said that Botrytist could not be inoculated. In controlled studies it was not successful. That was four years ago but I haven't seen any research saying differently. Maybe you could point to the source where you saw that the viticulturists were successful.

Terra Blanca Botrytized Semillon

We found a delicious Botrytized Semillon at Terra Blanca a few years ago. It had a wonderful and almost musky melon flavor, but not with an overly syrupy sweetness. We ended up randomly finding a bottle of it in a Fred Meyer a few months later and bought it for Thanksgiving. For not being a fan of sweet wines, I was pleasantly surprised.

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