Ch. d'Yquem...Is It Really A Great Wine????

For sure, terroir counts in Sauternes.
You can't make a great fake Sauternes anywhere else.
Impossible.
Best regards,
Alex R.

Well...yeah, Alex. You can't make great/fake Sauternes anywhere outside Sauternes/Barsac. But you can make great
botrytis Semillon/SauvBlanc in other places in the world. As great as d'Yquem?? Probably not.
Tom

Probably a better exercise would be to take each of those varieties and have a series of samples---dry, off-dry, sweet and botrytised. Best to have each sample come from the same general area too.
Then you might be able to make a case because you might have a chance of tracing the developing phases the wines go through and what they might characteristically display.
Still, I'm pretty much willing to believe---because I've seen people do it; good people who have spent their entire professional lives working with the wines you speak of---identify wines, and tell me fine details of them, to find out later they were absolutely correct. Could I? Not on your life. Could they? Sure convinced me they could.
Likewise, if you put me in front of 50 different CS/Merlot blends, I could safely clarify the blend in (possibly) a handful, and those out on the extremes. But I don't say it can't be done, or there can't be discernible differences...because I've seen other people do it with a high degree of accuracy, over and over again. So just because I can't determine them, I don't say there's no difference.
Once had a winemaker from Sauternes (one of the great producers) sit and list the different qualities of the wines of differing chateaux in great detail. That was his job...and his life...and he spent a great deal of focused time figuring those things out. Me? I drink Sauternes every great once and a while, and then only in very small quantities, and usually only one producer at a time. So I'm not very good at distinguishing those things.
David: saying Manfred Prum (and his daughter) "only makes Riesling" is like....like saying Poilane "only made bread" or Jack Daniel's "only made whiskey."

Well, Hoke...for an ordinary bloke like me...I just can't find any commonality in dry/TBA Semillon, Riesling, GWT. Dry Semillon, Riesling, GWT are all strikingly different in their character
and (relatively) easy to distinguish in their dry renditions. At the TBA level, I'm not so sure they're strikingly different. Strikingly enough that you can reliably identify the variety.
Maybe if you perform the exercise you suggest, you could train yourself to identify the varietal character in TBA-level wines. But that's left as an exercise for the (well-heeled) student.
Tom

Maybe if you perform the exercise you suggest, you could train yourself to identify the varietal character in TBA-level wines. But that's left as an exercise for the (well-heeled) student.
Tom

Agree with that, Tom!

Also, I'm reminded of the article Gerald Asher wrote some years ago in Gourmet, and also included in his book. One of the funniest wine pieces I have ever read, with Gerald's deliciously dry sense of humor and writing style, wherein he had a brilliant thought---that no one had systematically done a taste-investigation and reportage of which sweet wines went best with sweet desserts.

So Gerald, on a free weekend, arranged a lineup of some spectacular sweet wines of all sorts and styles, and then lined up all sorts of classic desserts in every category he could thing of...all with the idea of taking one sweetie and then matching it sequentially with each of the desserts.

Of course, reality struck when he got about halfway down the list of desserts with the first unctious, over the top, sweet and sticky, and was already bloated and surfeited with the sugar overload and realized he had done a terribly, terribly foolish thing....

You should track it down and read it. It's a hilarious piece.

Finally, I did a tasting seminar for the SWE some years ago entitled Great Stickies of the World, including a Tokaji Essenzia, d'Yquem, Nightingale, Madeira, Port, Australian Tokay/Muscat, German TBA, and more. It was SRO, and everyone managed to get through it, but it was still a tough haul for most in the audience.