Tyrrell's, Vat 1 Semillon, Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia 2016

Those who long for freshness, restraint and petite shapeliness in white wine paired with a bracingly acidic palate shouldn't confine their search to the northern hemisphere’s high-latitude wines. Australia's great original, Hunter Valley Semillon, offers just this profile in youth -- with the added lure of additional layers of perfume, complexity and character as the cellar years pass. This classic example is, at six years old, on the cusp: those unique scents of lime, parsley and rue are beginning to deepen, while the lean, saline edge of youth is beginning to soften and open. It's as pure and pristine as any Riesling, any Coteaux Champenois, any Txakolina, though its restrained fruit characters if anything makes it even more amenable than those wines at table.

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