Last year we went away for a long weekend in the Hunter Valley. It’s one of Australia’s great wine regions, and only a couple of hour’s drive from home. One of the wineries there is McLeish Estate, which is owned by a friend’s uncle. So of course we popped in for a look around and to taste some of the wines. I bought a bottle of shiraz for a gift and a bottle of this – Jessica’s Botrytis Semillon dessert wine.

Sweet dessert wines are one of my favourite things, even before I started this recent discovery of wine. We tasted this one at the end of our trip, after tasting a bunch of other wines – dry and sweet – and I recall being somewhat unimpressed, but perhaps it was just a jaded palate by that stage.

Trying it again now, it’s a delicious syrupy wine, honey sweet with a tang of oranges and a slight prickliness of fermentation. I think I detected a hint of peach in there too. As it swirls in the mouth, a balanced bitterness of orange peel comes out – not a bad thing at all, since it nicely complements the intense beginning sweetness, toning it down. Think the elegant sophistication of dark chocolate as opposed to the simple sweetness of milk chocolate.

We had it with a selection of cheeses, crackers, and sliced pear. Yum!