Nose
Distinctly old-style aromas of dried apricot, nut oil, molasses, hazelnut, smoke, toffee, walnut and truffle.
Palate
Thick and hugely sweet, with powerful acidity and an orange marmalade quality enlivening the creamy, saline apricot, nut and earth flavors. Plenty of supersweet honeyed botrytis here.
Growing Conditions
The aszú wines are produced from a combination of different vineyards where, in that specific year, botrytis happened. We always have high expectations from the Medve, Úrágya and Birsalmas vineyards to produce fantastic botrytis-affected grapes and, most of the years, our aszú berries come from a combination of these plots.
Harvest
Complex and mineral wines were born in the 2003 vintage. The year had an expected flow and without big unpredicted weather conditions. The grapes for this sweet wine started being harvested on November 4th. The harvest finished on January 14th of the following year.
Winemaking
Aszú (botrytis affected) berries are hand selected from the bunches and stored separately. The aszú berries are soaked with fermenting-must for 24 hours before pressing. The wine fermented in new oak barrels and was aged for 36 months in 225-liter Hungarian, French and American oak barrels. 10% of the barrels were new.
Aszú essencia is a wine style that no longer exists. It used to be sort of a “7 puttonyos” Aszú: sweeter than 6 puttonyos but less sweet than Essencia.
Historically, to produce Aszú wines, a certain number of baskets-full of hand-picked aszú berries (called puttony baskets) were soaked with one Gönci barrel (136 liter) of wine for a couple of hours before the pressing. This is where their historical name comes from, for example, 6 puttonyos aszú. 6 buckets of aszú berries were used to produce a barrel.
Appearance
Full orange-bronze. Pours thick.
