Campbells Rutherglen Muscat 500ml, Rutherglen

93 points Halliday Wine Companion

Cambells Rutherglen Muscat blend features six- to eight-year-old parcels of fortified Brown Muscat. It pours a bright amber gold with copper tones and greets with fresh, sweet raisin aromas and subtle notes of oak typical for the style. These spill into the luscious palate with a refreshing and cleansing hint of spirit and old oak keeping the sweetness in check.

Fresh and youthful, this Muscat can be enjoyed as a well-chilled aperitif over ice, and makes a great, sweet component in cocktails. Goes well with dried fruit and nuts, strong cheese, puddings and baked custards such as crème brûlée or Cuban flan. Serve slightly chilled and enjoy within the first couple of weeks once opened.

The current release features 220g/L residual sugar.

More about this wine

Fortified Muscat wines are made in most warmer wine growing regions from various varieties sharing the Muscat name. In Rutherglen, the traditional variety is Muscat à Petits Grains Rouge a.k.a. Brown Muscat.

The grapes are left until late in the season to achieve optimum ripeness, ensuring maximum fruit flavour and a high degree of natural sweetness. Selected parcels of the finished wine are then added to the Rutherglen Muscat solera which is a blend of a number of vintages from many past years. Wine can only be withdrawn from this solera when it matches exactly with the previous withdrawal thus ensuring the quality and consistency of style.

The key part in producing these wines comes just before bottling. Blending material from a solera system is an art form similar to producing non-vintage Champagne, but maintaining a house style is even more challenging for makers of fortified wines due to the depth in age, which for older wines count in decades instead of just a couple of years typical for the sparkling: Campbells manages a separate solera for each of the classification of Muscat and Topaque with the ‘Rare’ wines containing the wines of the previous four generations of Campbells.

About this producer

John Campbell came to Rutherglen to dig gold but ended up with the belief that the real gold of the region was in the first six inches of soil, planting his first vines in 1868 and establishing Campbells Wines in 1870.

Campbells of Rutherglen is today proudly owned by fifth generation sisters Jane and Julie Campbell, with Jane the Managing Director and Julie the winemaker and custodian of the world-famous Campbells style.

Viticulturist Bernard Morey leads the work in the 70-hectare vineyard defined by Rutherglen’s continental climate conditions. The vines stand in well-draining loam over buckshot subsoils, with trellising and management tailored to each variety. A continuous varietal and clonal selection program aims to protect this valuable site long into the future, while the nursery block features more than forty varieties on trial.