Few Australian dessert wines have the status of De Bortoli Noble One Botrytis Sémillon 2020. This iconic sweet wine was created in 1982 by Darren De Bortoli and, over 40 years later, it remains a benchmark for Australian botrytis wines. This immediately makes the style designation relevant. What is botrytis? It is noble rot, where grapes shrivel due to Botrytis cinerea, thus building extra concentration, honeyed notes, and complexity.
The basis of this wine lies in the Riverina, a warm wine region in New South Wales where botrytis can only truly thrive in the right seasons.
- Location / Origin: Noble One 2020 comes from the Riverina. For this vintage, fruit was used from a regular botrytis supplier as well as from De Bortoli's own estate vineyard, both with a long history of high-quality Botrytis Sémillon.
- Vineyard & Harvest: A relatively dry winter, late spring rains, and then rain in January, February, and early March led to the development and breakthrough of botrytis in the vineyards. The harvest began on March 18th and was the 2nd earliest Noble One harvest ever, which says a lot about the course of this growing season.
- Terroir character: For Noble One, the origin is not about coolness, but about the precise timing of moisture, fungal development, and harvest moment. This combination is precisely what makes botrytis in Riverina so crucial for concentration and style.
The winery's approach here is entirely focused on preserving concentration, freshness, and balance in a distinctly sweet style.
- Harvest & Selection: The fruit is harvested, crushed, and left overnight to release even more flavor and sweetness. This gives the wine extra intensity from the very beginning of vinification.
- Fermentation: After pressing, the juice is clarified and fermented in tanks. The fermentation is meticulously monitored until the right balance between alcohol, sweetness, and acidity is achieved, after which it is stopped to maintain precisely that rich yet lively style.
- Aging / Oak Maturation: The wine then ages for 12 months in French oak barriques. For the 2020 blend, 37% new oak, 33% 1 and 2-year-old barrels, and 30% unoaked components were used, ensuring that, in addition to vanilla and creaminess, there is also plenty of fresh fruit expression in the wine.
- Alcohol Percentage: At 9.0% alcohol, Noble One remains clearly sweet and luscious, but never cloying. Its firm acidic structure gives it length and precision.
Here, it's all about one grape that has received one of its most iconic sweet interpretations in Australia.
- Sémillon – Riverina: Sémillon forms the complete basis and gives the wine its combination of honey, citrus, stone fruit, and long, fresh tension. In botrytized style, this results in a particularly layered dessert wine profile here.
- Best Sweet White of the Year, Halliday Wine Companion Awards 2024: One of the strongest possible endorsements for an Australian dessert wine, and entirely fitting with the status of Noble One 2020.
- 2 trophies and 9 gold medals, Noble One 2020: This vintage was explicitly highlighted by De Bortoli themselves as a release that re-confirms Noble One's reputation.
- 4.2 stars from 5400+ reviews, Vivino: An excellent score that shows Noble One is also widely appreciated by wine lovers.
