Grape Profile
Sémillon

 

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Sémillon

Underrated, High Quality White Grape…Perfect for Innuendo

Sémillon is golden coloured grape producing high quality varietal and blended white wines across the globe.

As part of a successful partnership with Sauvignon Blanc it forms the basis for the top wines of Pessac-Léognan and Sauternes.

It produces one of the most under-rated single-varietal wines in the world in Australia’s Hunter Valley.

Sémillon is easy to cultivate, flowers late, and has a consistently high fruit set making it ideal for reliable production. Sémillon grapes are very susceptible to rot which, in the right conditions, can be very useful to attract Botrytis and produce some of the best sweet wines in the world.

Flavour

Sémillon doesn’t produce a lot of aroma in its youth, with basic green apple and lemon or lime citrus.  With bottle age, the best (e.g. Hunter Valley) can add honey, toast and nuttiness.

Sweet, noble rot wines can show off apricot, nectarine, and peach fruits, with orange marmalade, honey, nuts and lemon curd citrus with a silky, glycerol-induced, texture.

Style Range

DRY STYLE
Dry Sémillon is often used to add body to white blends.  Varietal Sémillon exists in areas the acidity is high enough, with its peak being Australia’s Hunter Valley.

SWEET STYLE
Sémillon’s grapes show a propensity to noble rot, and so go into the best noble rot sweet wines of Sauternes and New Zealand.  The style is thick, sweet and unctuous, with stone fruit, marmalade and honey.

Structure

Sémillon is a fat skinned grape and often shows of some beautiful colours of golden green up to copper coloured berries around harvest time.

Sémillon wines offer fatness and substance but often lacks acidity (except in Hunter Valley) and so works very well as blending partners, adding (often cheap) weight to the likes of Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, with Muscadelle often adding floral notes and fruit to blends.

Food Pairings

Sweeter styles pair beautifully with fatty dishes, either just as sweet, like cheesecake, or contrastingly salty like Roquefort cheese.

Dry styles, with enough acidity, are perfectly matched with seafood.

Growing Regions

FRANCE
Until recently Sémillon was the most planted white variety in Bordeaux, and still retains a 4:1 ration over sauvignon Blanc in the regions of Sauternes, Graves, and Barsac.

The low yielding, high quality Sémillon wines from the older vines in Graves and Pessac Léognan are long lived, golden, honeyed, and viscous, that often enjoy oak maturation before bottling.

It’s proneness to noble rot has made it a special grape for the Sauternes region for centuries.  When paired with oak maturation, the deep golden colour adds to the honeyed, apricot marmalade, and floral notes making some of the most alluring wines in the world.

Sémillon is also widely planted in Cadillac, Loupiac, and Bergerac making copies of both dry and sweet styles from Bordeaux.

AUSTRALIA
Australia’s seminal Sémillon is from the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney.  In youth they are low alcohol and full of lime citrus.  But with 10 years of bottle ageing the honeyed, toasty, nutty character is nearly unbelievable.  Such was the high acidity of Sémillon in Hunter Valley that it used to be referred to mistakenly as Hunter Valley Riesling.

Plantings are on the rise in the rest of Australia, again thanks to the boom in interest for the Bordeaux-Style Blends.  Oaked styles and blended styles are on the rise in Adelaide hills and Margaret River in the west.

Large scale, high volume plantings are all over the Riverland and Riverina bulk wine regions.

ELSEWHERE
South Africa’s relationship with Sémillon goes back a long way!  In 1822, Sémillon took up a whopping 93% of South Africa’s vineyard plantings.  Now it makes up just 1% of Cape plantings, although the recent success of Bordeaux Blends with Sauvignon Blanc has gained more attention.

Sémillon plantings in Chile are on the slide, with less than 2000 hectares in the whole country.  The wines are often used as bases for white blends destined for export.

In North America, Sémillon has struggled to match Sauvignon Blanc’s reputation.  It’s mostly used as a packer for white Bordeaux style blends, although some noble rot experiments are happening in Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Barbara.

In New Zealand there are grassy dry styles, like in Washington State, but it’s the potential for noble rot sweet wines that has plantings on the rise in Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay, on the North Island’s East coast.

Wanderlust’s Sémillon selection

If you love Sémillon you should also explore….

Sauvignon Blanc

Sémillon’s Bordeaux brother.  You’ll be able to compare and contrast the two and work out why they fit so well as blending partners

More about this grape

Chenin Blanc

Another often forgotten and under-appreciated French white variety that can produce very shy, but also very distinct wines

More about this grape