Showing posts with label OWC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OWC. Show all posts

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Our Wine Cellar

Our Wine Cellar - deep and diverse - horizontal, verticals, large formats and favorite styles and labels ...

I regularly refer to our wine cellar in these pages. I expose and feature it here. Each month the leading wine publication, Wine Spectator, features a collector in their Collecting column. We and our cellar collection were the feature in the June 15th, 2001 issue.

A highlight of the feature was our collection of birth year vintage wines for the birth years of our children, coupled with our collection of large format bottles of those wines - magnums, 3 liter double magnums, 5 liter Jeroboams, 6 liter Imperials, and a 9 liter Salmanazar.

Indeed, we served fine wines from those large format bottles at our all our childrens' weddings, and we're holding more for the others' upcoming weddings, anniversaries, and for other gala celebrations and events to come.
 
See links to Big Bottles, Birthyear Bottles, and Family celebrations: 


See my feature page Wine Bottle Sizes Explained on the different size bottles for different wine types. 
 
Large format, birth year vintage wines served at
our daughter's wedding.
Our cellar - Its not fancy, its functional, for a purpose. People often ask me about cellar design. Its a cellar - for wine storage. If you're creating a showroom or tasting or dining room, then so be it.. But who wants to dine in 58 degrees?

Racks? There are all kinds of racks and kits and professional designs and installations. Again, our cellar is utilitarian and the racks were somewhat of a 'family affair'. In fact, most of them were father-son projects over a period of time where we designed and built a wine storage rack as part of a fun, teaching, bonding, collaboration project. 
 
Each section and project provided an opportunity to spend time together and teach basic woodworking as well as project planning and management with my three sons. 

Hence, we have several wine racks of various  bespoke designs, not perfect, but uniquely 'ours', and each a special memory, and functional for the long run, especially those over-engineered or excessively designed, all purpose built for our cellar. 

Our cellar contains racks that were designed and purpose built for standard size 750 ml bottles - some for bulk storage and some for 'display'. 

We also built racks for our large format bottle collection - some for 1500ml or 1.5 liter 'magnum' bottles, 3 liter 'double magnum' bottles, and larger format bottles as well. 

We also have bulk storage racks designed to hold full original wood cases (OWC's) of wine - a format used for many premium and ultra-premium wines as well as many Grand Cru Classe and other quality Bordeaux wines. 

Also, many large format bottles have their own individual OWC's. Shown right are six liter bottles of 90BV6L - Silver Oak Bonny's Vineyard 1990 - one bottle per OWC, note serial numbers 41 and 47.

Temperature and humidity control - If building a cellar to store wine for more than the shortest term, temperature and humidity control are essential. Once again, there are residential and commercial grade units for temperature and humidity control. It's best to have these professionally installed as they can be complicated with needs for special wiring, water supply and water disposition. 

Our cellar employs two methods of temperature and humidity control. First, it is a true cellar, placed in a basement under the house at nine feet deep below grade. It is sided by concrete walls on three sides that are exterior below grade. So the basic temperature is naturally moderate and rather stable. 

Additionally, we have a passive temperature control system. Living in an unincorporated location without municipal services, we have our own well for water service to our home. As part of that system, we have a large well water tank to pressurize and supply our property with water. That well tank is in our wine cellar and provides a constant 55% degree heat sink to moderate the cellar environment. 

We also have supplemental air conditioning to provide auxiliary cooling for the cellar when needed. 

At the end of the day, (or decade), the true test is how well bottles age in the cellar. We regularly open aged vintage bottles of wine that have been stored in our cellar since being acquired upon release, ten, twenty and as long as thirty-five years earlier. Invariably, the bottles, corks, labels, and most importantly, the wine have aged gracefully and appropriately. We often say, whatever we are doing, keep doing it, when we open such bottles of well maintained, properly aged, fine wines, in superb condition.  

We hold about 2500+ bottles in our cellar, plus more in a couple wine coolers adjacent to the kitchen for staging. While we're at a stage of life where we should be consuming our wine, we still tend to acquire our share as well so the holdings remain the same. We have almost as much  fun acquiring the wine, as we do drinking it, as this blog will atest. 

As to be expected, 95 percent of our wine cellar is Red wines. Only a couple cases of whites and Champagnes are held for short duration cellaring, nearer term drinking. We do have a collection of white dessert wines which do age well and can be held for decades or more but its single digit cases. 
 
People regularly ask me where I buy my wines. The answer is, wherever wines are sold. Actually, we regularly 'audit' the local wine shops, both the wine superstores, and the local independent merchants. We're always on the prowl for values, but also trying and buying wines in the styles that we prefer. We're also always buying and trying new labels, and occasionally, new regions or styles.  
 
We also acquire wine from favorite produces through their 'clubs' or memberships - ensuring continuity and access to favorite labels - especially for our collectibles. Much of the fun of collecting is comparing a label from vintage to vintage, over time as it ages, at different stages of its tasting/aging profile. One of the benefits of having a wine group of wine buddies is that we mix it up, spreading and sharing the club memberships. This way we can participate in three or four times as many clubs between us, and then we share the case purchases between three or four of us.
 
Lastly, we're always filling out our collections with new vintages of our verticals or new labels of our horizontals. (A vertical collection is many vintages of the same label; a horizontal is multiple labels of the same vintage). 
 
Readers of this column know we have vertical collections of favorite labels that span as much as 25 years (obviously age-worthy wines) and horizontal collections for each of our childrens' (and now grandchildren's) birth-years. 
 
Selection from Vertical Collection of Dunn Vineyards
Cabernet Sauvignons
These pages are filled with different examples of tasting events of various verticals or horizontals. We hold vertical collections spanning as long as three decades of numerous producers including Del Dotto, Robert Craig, Clark Claudon, Dunn Family Vineyards, Fantesca, Ducru Beaucaillou, Leoville Las Cases, Gruaud Larose and others.

See the following features from our earlier blogposts highlighting vertical or horiztonal tastings: 

Ducru Beaucaillou Vertical Showcases Pour Boys Wine Dinner

Kathryn Hall Vertical Tasting - Hall Wine Release Tour 2015

Silver Oak Alexander Valley Vertical

 In some cases we did a mini horizontal and vertical in one tasting:

Caymus and Del Dotto Napa Cabernets - 1995-96 horizontal - vertical !

Example of a gala Horizontal Vintage tasting from our Pour Boys Wine Group:

Bordeaux 2003 Horizontal Tasting on the Cityscape Deck - Grilled Steak Dinner

2003 Vintage Bordeaux Horizontal Flight
 
As mentioned often in these pages, we maintain our cellar inventory in CellartrackerI was developing a personal app on my own and had a vision for essentially the same solution, however, I'm a marketing guy, not a software engineer with the skills to develop a comprehensive sophisticated application. I spoke of my vision for such a site in my Wine Spectator interview in 2001.

CellarTracker was originally created in March, 2003 by Eric LeVine who was working for Microsoft at the time, to track his own collection. After extending access to several friends the site quickly grew to 100 users tracking 60,000 bottles.

LeVine launched the site to the public in 2004 and left shortly thereafter to manage it full time. Since then, the site has grown steadily every since.

Today, CellarTracker is the leading cellar management tool with hundreds of thousands of collectors tracking more than 75 million bottles. CellarTracker has also grown to become the largest database of community tasting notes with more than 5.8 million notes as of late 2016. The site is also visited by millions of wine enthusiasts annually to read the reviews and get wine recommendations. Patron members who contribute a voluntary fee get access to cost information - the aggregate average price paid for a wine by the community. This in of itself is worth the annual contribution investment, the ability to validate the price of any particular wine across a wide community of mostly astute consumers.

Finally, here is a link to a gallery of our friends' wine cellars, many of which you see featured in these pages over the past years, or certainly the wines from such cellars.  Friends Cellars - Take a look at the cellars of our Pour Boy wine group and other friends

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Parents-Son Dinner features Birth Year Wine of the Year

Parents-Son Dinner features Birth Year Wine of the Year

Visiting son Alec and his fiance' Vivianna in New York City for the weekend, we took a couple of very special wines from Alec's birth year. We drank the first bottle, Château Calon-Ségur that we took BYOB to Bobo French Wine Dine Experience on Friday night.

Tonight, Alec and Viv were preparing dinner and to celebrate their engagement and the occasion, we took from our home cellar a very special bottle that I acquired upon release for his birth year. The 1990 vintage was a very unique year in the release of vintage wines in that three times, the Wine Spectator Wine of the Year was from that vintage year.

In 1993, the WS Wine of the Year was Caymus Special Select, Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, 1990. In 1994, the WS Wine of the Year was Chateau Gran Vin Latour Pauillac Bordeaux, from the 1990 vintage. In 1995, the ‘Red Wine of the Year’ by Wine Spectator magazine was Penfold's Grange, 1990. 

This is testimony to the fact that 1990 was a blockbuster vintage in all three hemispheres' top wine regions - US Napa Valley, France Bordeaux and Australia. Someone want to collect a birthyear vintage wine for a given year has several options from which to select. For this year, any one of these three regions offered top rated wines!


Tonight's bottle was part of an OWC - Original Wood Case of the 1990 Penfold's Grange that I picked up on release back in 1993. I actually purchased it a Berry Brothers & Ruud in London during one of my very frequent monthly trips there. In those days, they had a wine shop in Terminal Three at London Heathrow Airport. I purchased and hand carried the case of wine on the plane enroute home, and have stored it in our home cellar ever since.

For dinner, Alec and Viv prepared ribeye steak with wine reduction mushroom sauce, grilled diver sea scallops, asparagus and pomme frites.


For the starter wine, they opened a Orin Swift Abstract California Red Wine 2016



Penfolds Grange Shiraz 1990

For the main beef entree course, I served the Penfolds Grange. Readers of this blog know we drink a lot of Australian Shiraz' and that we like them big and bold. This Aussie Shiraz was a totally different profile than the usual shiraz we encounter. Naturally, this is an extraordinary wine that is in a totally different class, with a totally different profile than the once a week, once-a-month, or even the once-a-year wines that we drink. This is one of those very special occasion, or even once in a lifetime wines. Of course, this wine sells for more than $500, a price-point higher than we normally spend on once a year, once a month or other wines.

Grange is arguably the most prestigious and most historic, famous wine from Australia, first released back with the experimental vintage release in 1951. For its first four decades, the label was called Penfold's Hermitage Grange. With this 1990 release, the Hermitage moniker was removed and thereafter it is simply known as Grange.



The fruit for Grange is sourced from south central Australia Barossa Valley, Clare Valley and Coonawarra. The 1990 is one of the top Granges ever produced. The vintage year was an ideal completely trouble-free growing season that enabled the grapes to ripen perfectly and to be harvested at the perfect time under ideal conditions. The producer says the 1990 Penfolds Grange is one of the best ever, with the potential to eventually rival the classic vintages of 1955, 1962 and 1971. It should be aged carefully for a minimum of ten years and preferably for 25 to thirty years.

The blend of the 1990 vintage is 95% Shiraz and 5% Cabernet Sauvignon. It was aged 18 months in new American oak hogsheads.

The fill level was proper and appropriate for its age, the cork was perfect, and of course the foil and label were perfect as it was still packaged in the original tissue and OWC - original wood case. 

Dark garnet colored, medium-full bodied, flawless, elegant, polished, harmonious, perfectly balanced, silky smooth flavors of concentrated black berry and black raspberry fruits with notes of vanilla, licorice, spice, black truffles and oak with hints of spice and cedar turning to fine grained tongue puckering tannins on the long lingering finish.

RM 95 points.

Wine Spectator gave this 98 points, James Halliday 97 points, Robert Parker's Wine Advocate 95 points, and Jancis Robinson gave it 18 out of her twenty point scale. 

James Halliday said it was 'destined to be one of the greatest Granges'. Wine Spectator called it  'magnificent, exotic, a veritable cascade of opulent flavors'. The Rewards of Patience - Fifth Edition (2004) called it Outstanding and projected its Drinking Window from now to 2040. Southcorp Wines said, 'The 1990 vintage was the kind that winemakers only expect to see once or twice in an entire career'.

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=6295

https://www.penfolds.com/

https://twitter.com/penfolds

@penfolds


La Fine du Château La Nerthe Châteauneuf du Pape 1988

After dinner, Alec opened this special extremely limited release Chateau La Nerthe La Fine 1988.

We discovered, tasted, and Alec acquired this wine during our visit to the Château La Nerthe estate this summer.

La Fine de Château La Nerthe comes exclusively from the distillation of white wine in bottles of the Château. White wine is aged in bottles in the cellars before being tasted and distilled.

Château La Nerthe perform a triple distillation to obtain the finest and delicate aromas possible. They seek the spirit of their old white wines that make the reputation of Château La Nerthe. By its origin, its extraction, its requirement and its refinement of 10 years minimum in oak casks, the Fine of the Castle La Nerthe is the expression of the exceptional finest spirit of their wines.


Château La Nerthe have been producing these fine wines in the true tradition of fine wine distillation in Châteauneuf du Pape since this, their first vintage, 1988.

Tea honey colored, full bodied, delicious, smooth, harmonious, nicely balanced.

RM 93 points.

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=3330760

http://www.chateaulanerthe.fr/



Sunday, June 24, 2018

Sea Smoke, Ducru, Quilceda Creek, Peter Michael Belle Côte Premier Dinner Flight

Sea Smoke, Ducru, Quilceda Creek, Peter Michael Belle Côte Premier Dinner Flight

For an impromptu Saturday evening wine dinner, we hosted Dr Dan and Linda to grilled steaks, scalloped potatoes and grilled vegetables.

Before dinner we had a selection of artisan cheeses with honey roasted walnuts.

After dinner we had Linda's homemade dark chocolate mousse cake with fresh cream and berries.

Dan brought a couple of fabulous ultra-premium bottles from Peter Michael and SeaSmoke and I pulled from the cellar two favorite bottles to round out a spectacular wine flight, Ducru Beaucaillou and Quilceda Creek Columbia Valley red wine Bordeaux varietal blend.

Peter Michael Belle Côte Knights Valley Sonoma County Chardonnay 2013

Before dinner, with a selection of artisan cheeses we tasted this exquisite limited release ultra premium Peter Michael Sonoma County Chardonnay. Butter colored, medium-full bodied, silky smooth, elegant and polished. With his rich history and roots back in Berkshire, England, where I worked for thirteen years, I regret I never connected with Peter Michael and his California wine activities.

Robert Parker gave this release 99 points and said it is 'flirting with perfection'. Parker writes of this wine showing "almost stony liqueur of rocks, lemon butter, and white peach', and describes it as a 'full-bodied, intense wine with loads of tangerine oil, pineapple jam and that wet stone minerality .... extremely massive, rich, super-concentrated".

James Suckling gave this wine 94 points saying, "This is very open and fruit driven with papaya, mango, and hints of nuts. Lychee too. Full-bodied, fresh and flavorful.... Persistent finish. Lovely purity".

James Laube of Wine Spectator gave it 93 points and cites it "Oozing with complex flavors of honeydew, toasty oak, fig, apricot and tangerine, this is enlivened by snappy acidity and ends with a long, expansive flavor". 

RM 93 points.

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=2029455

Transitioning from the pre-dinner course to dinner Dan brought and opened this Sea Smoke 'One Barrel' Pinot Noir. This is a select ultra-premium limited production label from this premier producer that has a cult-like following. This label is only released in years producing fruit worthy of the designated label.  Most years, the winery chooses what they consider their best barrel of their estate-grown Pinot Noir and bottle it as the One Barrel label.


Sea Smoke "One Barrel" Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir 2014


Sea Smoke produces a line up of ultra-premium estate wines from their vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills appellation at the western end of the Santa Ynez Valley in the California Central Coast wine region.

The name Sea Smoke refers to the marine fog that wafts in from the Pacific Ocean that actually surrounds the area in three directions, to the west, south and southeast. The fog has a profound effect on Sea Smoke wines as the vineyards benefit from the cooling influences of this marine layer from the Pacific Ocean which is about 16 miles away.

The AVA's (appellation) coastal valleys, formed by the Purisima Hills to their north and the Santa Rosa Hills to their south, funnel the cool Pacific breezes up through the vineyards. This ventilation helps to maintain healthy vines by reducing the incidence of fungal infections, while also cooling the vines down in the hot afternoon sunshine.

 With a latitude of 34 degrees north, Sta. Rita Hills lies closer to the equator than any European wine region, but, rather than seeing an increase in temperature as a result, the region's strong maritime influences keep daytime temperatures within bearable limits. The fog also acts as a climatic moderator, lowering the temperatures during the hot summer months. The combined effects of the ocean breezes and fog significantly extend Sta. Rita Hills's growing season, giving its grapes extra time to develop full ripeness.

From the winery: "Each year we select the best barrel of our estate-grown Pinot Noir; every bottle of ‘One Barrel’ produced is from that single, special barrel. It is a unique combination of vintage, vineyard location, Pinot Noir clone and barrel cooper —never to be repeated. Two hundred and eighty prized bottles, from One Barrel."

I am not a huge fan of Pinot Noir and am less discriminating in this type of wine. Never-the-less this was garnet colored, medium bodied, polished and silky smooth, complex with harmonious flavors of dark berry, cranberry, dusty rose and hints of strawberry with mild smooth silky tannins on the finish.

RM 93 points. 

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=2324581

https://www.seasmoke.com/

Château Ducru Beaucaillou St Julien Bordeaux 1989

This has been one of my favorite Bordeaux wines going back to the early eighties when I collected this label in large format bottles for son Ryan's 1982 birth year that we eventually served at his wedding. As such, we collected a vertical collection of this label for all the kids' birth years and still hold more than a dozen vintages of this label dating back to those early eighties releases.

Tonight, this bottle was from a original wood case (OWC) that I acquired upon release around 1991-92. Back then, we could carry wine as carry on luggage on the airplane and I remember many times carrying a case of wine on board back from San Francisco during the many years I commuted there to Silicon Valley for work.

As a long time friend and 'Pour Boy' wine buddy, Dan has grown accustomed to this wine too and hence I serve it often when we're together for occasions such as this.

This is actually a tasting note for this wine from earlier this year in February. "Tonight was consistent with my notes from a decade ago. Garnet color -
medium-light delicate body; floral perfume, black cherry and berry fruits with layers of anise, tobacco and black tea and a hint of leather, with floral continuing on a modest tannin finish. Tasting alongside the 2009, an interesting comparison to the 2009, very different profile between the two vintages, but showing some signs of similarity in the terroir character of the label."

RM 91 points.

I've been saving many of my 1989 vintage wines for fellow Pour Boy and wine buddy Bill C and his son Matt for his birth year. Note Bill, there are six more of these left from this vintage OWC (and an full, still unopened OWC of Pichon Lalande 1989! - there's a party there!).

https://unwindwine.blogspot.com/2018/02/otbn-2018_25.html

Quilceda Creek Columbia Valley Red Wine Blend 2005

Trolling the cellar for another bottle for after dinner sipping and to accompany Linda's dark chocolate mousse cake with fresh berries and whipped cream, Dan and I selected this Quilceda Creek Columbia Valley Red (Bordeaux varietal blend). Dan had never had Quilceda Creek so this was a special treat to bring together and introduce one of our favorite wines to wine 'brother' Dr Dan!

My last review of this dozen year old vintage was back in 2011 when I wrote: "Deep, dark purple color - medium-full bodied - complex, soft polished bouquet and tastes of ripe black and red berry fruits, a soft layer of mocha and vanilla with a smooth moderate tannin finish. Nice easy drinking wine when the call is for a sophisticated red during the hot weather. Nice complement to grilled tenderloin and roasted potatoes - and to the chocolate berry desert. The soft smooth character of this wine seems to be contrary to the the blend of 84% Cabernet Sauvignon, 9% Cabernet Franc, 7% Merlot. This wine is consistently enjoyable."

Tonight this tasting of this label was consistent with that experience and was a perfect selection for the occasion. I marveled at how good this wine was and thoroughly enjoyed it as one of the highlights of the evening, large accolades, indeed, against such a exquisite line up of extraordinary wines!

RM 92 points.

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=437099

Collection of birth year wines held in OWC - original wood cases, from release, shown below.

 

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Chateau La Louviere Pessac-Leognan 1994

Château La Louvière Pessac-Leognan Graves Bordeaux 1994

I last tasted and wrote about this wine about eighteen months ago when I wrote, "There is still life left in this nineteen year old. We still have half a dozen half bottles of this original case we purchased upon release. The original wood cases of 375ml small format half bottles contained 24 bottles equaling the same amount of wine as twelve regular 750ml bottles."  

That OWC - Original Wood Case, shown left, was buried in a double stack of cases in the corner of the cellar. When I moved the stack to gain access to our well tank recently, which provides passive cooling in our subterranean cellar, I pulled out this case and realized, that while its a half case, its twelve bottles remaining, since a case of 375 half bottles actually contains twice as many bottles, (but the same amount of wine (as a standard case of 12 bottles of 750ml each, as noted above.))

So we still have ten or eleven bottles of this left, and based on tonight's tasting, its time to drink up! Still not bad since the smaller 375 ml format bottles tend to age less gracefully and not hold as long as standard or larger format bottles. Our Tasting Journal Index for this wine shows a half dozen tasting notes going back seven years. (I suspect I have earlier tasting notes not indexed. I'll look into this at some point.)

While I lauded that there was life left in the earlier bottle tasting note, tonight, the dark berry fruits are definitely giving way to non-fruit earth, leather, creosote and musty wood notes. 

Dark ruby color with a brownish tinge starting to set in. Medium bodied, leathery and smoky creosote tones predominate over the black cherry and black berry fruits, accented by cedar and tangy and slightly tart cinnamon spice that gives way to a big full floral note that fills the mouth and lingers for minutes with the tongue coating moderate tannins.

This wine provides a good QPR - Quality Price Ratio with its pleasant early drinkability coupled with its longevity.

RM 86 points, (diminished from 89 at last tasting).


https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=38869

Friday, May 30, 2014

Clarendon Hills Astralis Shiraz 2005

Clarendon Hills Astralis McLaren Vale Shiraz 2005

Son Ryan opened this to celebrate the first week in their new home and his first day on the new job. And he invited Dad over for a taste. While this is the flagship of the extensive  Clarendon Hills line which includes eight different Shiraz labels, I prefer the style of their Piggott Range more. This has more of the tasting profile of the incredible Tanunda 100 Year Old Vines Shiraz we tasted last weekend, not surprising, since this too is sourced from old vines, from their first vineyard planted in 1920. Like the Tanunda, Astralis has limited production of only 150 cases.

At a release and market price of $180, this is in the super ultra-premium stratosphere, even more than the Tanunda at a release price of $125. This is a classic example where taste is in the eyes of the beholder and all that matters is one's personal pallet preference. I much prefer any one of several of my favorite Shiraz labels that are all in the $70 to $90 range and a select few at even less. Of course, as I often write in this blog, the thrill of the hunt and ultimate quest is to find that high QPR (Quality Price Ratio) wine that offers the same satisfaction at a fraction of the (premium) price.

This is the first bottle we have tasted from a case Ryan purchased and split with me recently. As part of its premium price-point, Astralis (like the Tanunda) comes with premium packaging in its own branded OWC, Original Wood Case (pictured left).

McLaren Vale is in south central Australia on the north-west of the Fleurieu Peninsula about 25 miles south of Adelaide. It is one of the oldest and highly regarded wine producing areas in the country. It was granted its appellation status, in Australia known as GI or Geographical Indication in 1997.

The climatic and geographical diversity of McLaren Vale is suitable for a wide array of grape varieties which are grown there including Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache and Mourvedre, which, together with Shiraz, make up some of the most acclaimed 'GSM' blends. Other varietals grown in the region in lesser amounts are Merlot, Zinfandel, Tempranillo,  Sangiovese and Viognier.
 
McLaren Vale is also the source of white wine varietals, most notably Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.

Shiraz leads the region's list of award-winning wines with the best wines coming from very old vines, some planted more than 100 years ago.

This wine got huge reviews and scores from Robert Parker's Wine Advocate (99 points) and Wine Spectator (96 points) and  Stephen Tanzer's IWC (95 points). Either our bottle was slightly tainted (which I don't believe), the cork showed ever so slight signs of seepage (shown right), or, at nine years old it is in a somewhat closed period in its aging profile. I found it a bit closed and its aromatics suppressed. Never-the-less, this is a big unctuous, tongue-coating complex wine, deep dark inky purple colored wine with layers of concentrated ripe black and blue berry fruits with a layer of graphite and mineral, which in my opinion detracts from the fruit and other complementary tones of expresso, tobacco and spice box, leading to a smooth silky polished tannin lingering finish. It did not seem to have a firm structure and backbone built for longer term aging.

RM 92 points.

https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=421401

http://www.clarendonhills.com.au/home.aspx