For Winexpert retailers such as ourselves, October means Limited Edition time. You'll have to excuse us if we spend a lot of time talking about it over the next little while but we get pretty excited each year when the new line-up is made known. For those of you who don't know, the Limited Edition (LE) wines are special wine releases dated for the year the grapes are harvested (eg this year is LE2012) and made available between January and April of the following year. Since they are made in small, "limited" quantities we start taking reservations for them as soon as the list is made available to us.

So, why are we so excited? Well, Winexpert has been making LE wines for 21 years now and they have always (in our experience) been high quality and creatively sourced varieties from all over the world. Many of our favourite wine styles that we have in our regular line-up started out as LE offerings such as New Zealand Pinot Noir, Muller Thurgau and Symphony to mention a few. There are many other wines that we have available today that we first saw as part of a LE blend, as well. 

When it comes to quality these Limiteds provide great bang for your buck. Though the price of LE wines are on par with the Selection International Series, I would rank the quality level as being between the Selection International and the Estate Series, which is the highest quality we have. They provide good aging potential, if you are so inclined, and they win many medals each year at the Winemaker International Winemaking Competition.

One of the reasons for this combination of high quality and limited supply is that, at times, Winexpert will find an exceptional source of juice, too good to pass up, yet the supply will be too small with which to go into full production. So, the juice is purchased and blended (or not) and sold in these "Limited" amounts for a short period of time. The advantage, besides the high quality level, is the ability of Winexpert to showcase new varietals that they do not usually have or to offer common varieties from regions that are usually unavailable. Also, interesting blends can be introduced via the LE wines into the regular line-up if people respond well to them.

Some of my personal favourites over the years have come from the LE wines and sometimes Winexpert will repeat a popular style if they can. For example, the Italian Nebbiolo that we have for this year was first made as part of the LE2005. It was also one of my first Gold Medal winners at the Winemaker Int'l Winemaking Competition, so I'm pretty happy to see this varietal come around again. Other examples of repeat wines in the LE collection (which also happen to be personal favourites of mine, too) are Australian Petit Verdot and Italian Brunello, both of which are now available full time. 

So, now that you know how we feel about the Limiteds I am interested to hear from you. How long have you been making the Limited Edition wines? What have been your favourite wines that you have made over the years? You can use the comments section below to tell us.