Shackled with a tangle of consonants and vowels, Chateau d'Yquem is usually referred to simply as Yquem (pronounced ee-kem) with the letter 'd' articulated only when Chateau is parked in front of it.

We owe this nectar of the gods to action by a fungus called Botrytis cinerea. Because Botrytis cinerea is asexual, it doesn't bother dating around, but reproduces immediately by forming spores that surreptitiously hitchhike from grape to grape. This sexually liberated fungus is the spore-forming version of - and I am not making this up - Botryotinia fuckeliana.

Botryis cinerea, more poetically known as 'noble rot', has a shameless sweet tooth. Thriving on sweet juicy pulp, the fungus systematically punctures grape skins with needle-like fibres to feed on the rich juice. Over a period of time, these microscopic holes allow the watery liquid in the grape to evaporate, resulting in a grape with intensely concentrated sweetness. As the infection progresses, the grapes turn brown, wrinkled and furry, similar to what one finds in the fridge after returning from a long holiday.

While many new world regions produce top-quality sweet wines, there's only one that has managed to come close to Sauternes' style: De Bortoli's Noble One (Ponti Wines; $230 a half bottle). Julie Mortlock, who makes the famed Australian wine, points out that noble rot does not progress evenly through the vineyard and 'it is common to have bunches with some grapes brown and shriveled while others are green.' As anyone acquainted with Yquem's marketing material knows, the chateau painstakingly harvests its grapes in multiple rounds,

or tris, to ensure all grapes are equally endowed with botrytic influence. Mortlock argues that mixing in a few uninfected, green grapes helps to provide a refreshing acidic balance to her wines as well as prevent the pressing process from becoming gummed up. Squeezing juice out of a clump of gooey, rotting raisins isn't easy, nor does it yield much juice, which explains the stratospheric prices of Chateau d'Yquem.