Winemaker Notes
Critical Acclaim
All VintagesThis honey-colored dessert wine still retains much of its varietal character, just in an intensely concentrated guise. Flavors like dried pineapple and guava, melted butter on brioche and dried green herbs are lifted by Marlborough’s typical zing of elevated acidity, all wearing a sweet, but not overly so, cloak. Maritime Wine Trading Collective.
Orange blossom and honeyed aromas. Lovely richness on the palate with a lift of acidity. Long, clean and still refreshing.
Creating honest, tasty, fruit-packed Marlborough wines is what Jules does best. Her wine is for people who laugh. People who sing, dance, feast and celebrate. People who sit out on the back deck solving the world’s problems.
Born in Marlborough in the year the first vines were planted, Jules has literally grown up with Sauvignon Blanc. Deeply invested in the region and its grape growing families, she has made some of Marlborough’s best known and successful wines.
Several life-affirming vintages in Italy underscored Jules’ love of wine as a simple pleasure to be enjoyed alongside good food and great friends. Jules strongly believes wine should be more about creating great memories and less about status or cellaring potential.
Today, Jules makes her harvesting decisions in the vineyard, purely by taste rather than by laboratory analyses. Come harvest time, you’ll find Jules relentlessly walking the rows of each vineyard, tasting berries for days on end, searching for the perfect flavor profile.
Jules left her corporate winemaking career behind to give her the freedom to make wines the way she thinks they should be made. No matter the cost, Jules will only release a wine if she is entirely satisfied it has met her standards. She only makes one batch of each wine every harvest. So, enjoy it while you can. Once it’s gone, it’s well and truly gone.
Every bottle of Jules Taylor wine is, in our humble opinion, exceptional. Jules only makes top notch wines and she guarantees this personally when she puts her name on the bottle. They are great memories in a bottle, created with sunshine from Marlborough and love from Jules.
An icon and leading region of New Zealand's distinctive style of Sauvignon blanc, Marlborough has a unique terroir, making it ideal for high quality grape production (of many varieties). Despite some common generalizations, which could be fairly justified given that Marlborough is responsible for 90% of New Zealand's Sauvignon blanc production, the wines from this region are actually anything but homogenous. At the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, the vineyards of Marlborough benefit from well-draining, stony soils, a dry, sunny climate and wide temperature fluctuations between day and night, a phenomenon that supports a perfect balance between berry ripeness and acidity.
The region’s king variety, Sauvignon blanc, is beloved for its pungent, aromatic character with notes of exotic tropical fruit, freshly cut grass and green bell pepper along with a refreshing streak of stony minerality. These wines are made in a wide range of styles, and winemakers take advantage of various clones, vineyard sites, fermentation styles, lees-stirring and aging regimens to differentiate their bottlings, one from one another.
Also produced successfully here are fruit-forward Pinot noirs (especially where soils are clay-rich), elegant Riesling, Pinot gris and Gewürztraminer.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.