Wine Review: 2009 Vidal Ice Standing Stone Vineyards

This weekend, I had the pleasure of tasting a wonderful dessert wine.  The basic information.

Winery:  Standing Stone
Wine:  Vidal Ice
Year:  2009
Drank:  6/11/2011

The color is a light amber, a very warm color.  The first scent from it is of honey and strawberries, a powerful aroma.  Swirling increases the honey scent but a new fruit comes forth, pear.  The honey, so present in the aroma, is tasted immediately on the tip of the tongue.  As the wine travels back, it subtly coats your palette, though not syrupy like some other dessert wines.  The pears and strawberries return in the mid mouth.  At the end, hints of pineapple are discovered.  Additionally, the pear flavor iaccentuatedl when the flavor of its peel surfaces.  The pear and pineapple flavors linger after the finish.

One of the best parts about tasting a great wine is delving into each new level of complexity, moving from the color of the wine, smelling the wine once, swirling it to see what aromas are hidden within, and finally tasting the wine and allowing the flavors from each area of the palette to come through.  A good wine makes the initial process easy by balancing acidity, alcohol, sugar, and other characteristic flavors of a particular grape  or grapes.  But beyond that, a great wine makes the whole tasting a search for every flavor, each taste revealing more.  In tasting this wine for example, the pear was not immediately obvious, but it was noticeable. Each taste brought more variety and because the wine was so well balanced, I anticipated each taste.

There are many traps a dessert wine can fall into that this wine does not.  Dessert wines can be syrupy, almost sticking to your mouth.  This one doesn't.  A dessert wine can be overly sweet, covering up the wonderful fruit flavors that should be present.  This wine doesn't.  The sweetness comes from the fruit flavors.  Dessert wines are often weak on the finish.  This Vidal Ice has a particularly powerful finish.

At the risk of sounding corny, a dessert wine should be judged on whether you would drink it, and only it, for desert.  I would drink this for dessert whenever possible.

Final Rating: 9.5/10

Yes, I know it is kind of a cop out to not give this a 10/10.  Maybe I'll need to retroactively go back and change this after tasting a few 100 wines.  If you are really hung up about it, consider it a 10, and buy this whenever you have the chance.