Chambers Rosewood Vineyards Rutherglen Muscat NV (non-vintage) from Rutherglen, Australia is18.5%abv. and comes in a 375ml. bottle. It has a medium body with an orange/dark amber color. It has a lovely aroma of flowers, oranges, and honey with a complementary taste of dates, honey, spices, and oranges. I could sip on this floral, decadent wine all day long, but at 18.5% abv. I probably wouldn't be able to write after a few hours. I was able to find it locally in NYC for around $17 a bottle which is a great price for this quality of wine. The wine makers say that the wine will keep for months if sealed and I have found that over the past few weeks it has kept very well indeed.

The Chambers Winery has been a family owned and run business since it was started in 1858. The wine making and care of the "old material" (solera style aged wines) have been handed down from father to son through five generations, and for the last 40 years have rested with Bill Chambers.

The solera style is a wine making method used in the production of Spanish sherry where some of the old wines are drawn off for bottling and then the rest are topped up by wines from the next oldest level and so on. Wines in a solera may be decades or hundreds of years old. This is a mildly fortified wine with the fermentation process being halted early with the addition of small amounts of neutral spirits and then the wine is aged in wood in the solera.

The Rutherglen Muscat is the entry level of four Muscat's that Chambers produces. Rutherglen, Classic, Grand, and the incredibly pricey, and as the name says, Rare. The Rare Muscat is indeed so rare that distributors for whole countries may only get 1-2 bottles every few years. So don't count on my doing a review on it anytime soon unless one of you Slashfoodies gives me a bottle for the holidays.

By the way don't get the names Muscat and Muscadelle mixed up due to the similar names. They are different grapes with their own unique flavor profiles. The Muscadelle tends to have molasses and tea flavors and the Muscat has a more floral aroma and honey and caramel flavors.