Rutherglen Muscat

Rutherglen Muscat is Australia's iconic sticky fortified wine — a lusciously sweet, barrel-aged dessert wine made in the hot river country of north-east Victoria from the red-berried Muscat à Petits Grains Rouge, known locally as Brown Muscat or Red Frontignac. Grapes are left to hang and shrivel toward raisins on the vine, crushed, and part-way through fermentation fortified with neutral grape spirit, which halts the yeast and locks in a huge ribbon of the grape's own concentrated sugar. The young wine is then matured for years — sometimes decades — in old oak casks in Rutherglen's baking sheds, where slow evaporation and gentle oxidation deepen it to a treacle-thick, tawny-mahogany wine that smells and tastes of raisin, toffee, dried fig, malt, marmalade, coffee and toffee-apple. Poured in a small glass, it is one of the world's great fortified sweet wines — served with plum pudding, blue cheese, dark chocolate or simply on its own as a digestif.