Deep purple color. The nose sports mulled cherries and deep currant fruit, with a spicy mix of anise, black pepper, tar, leather and espresso. Full but fresh, this shows solid grip but smooth edges to the tannins and moderate acidity. The fig paste and cranberry relish fruit is delicious, and it’s backed up with tar, anise, cocoa, sweet bell pepper, chewing tobacco and some black olive. Really fun and lively but also pretty, complex and age-worthy. All Cab Franc aged in 100% French oak.
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2021 Petite Sirah / 91 Points / James Suckling
The nose is rich and powerful, with aromas of black cherries, dark chocolate, roasted meat and licorice. The palate is rich and dense, with a full body, firm tannins and moderate acidity, displaying notes of blackberry jam, cassis and blood plums. Drink or hold.
2009 Cabernet a Great Wine in Fredric Koeppel’s look back at 2020
This annual post looks back at all the wines I wrote about in the previous year and singles out 50 that I thought were great wines. “Great” doesn’t necessarily imply the most profound, though several of these are as profound as wine gets; nor does it necessarily mean that these are the world’s famed wines intended for laying down in cellars for long aging. I don’t usually encounter such wines anyway.
2013 Cabernet Sauvignon / 90+ / International Wine Review
Showing a multifaceted bouquet of dark red fruit and earthy tobacco, the 2013 Cab is a bit lighter than the 2016 vintage, but it offers lots of sweet dark fruit flavors accompanied by notes of pepper and tobacco. There’s well integrated oak and a persistent finish with solid tannins. A great steak wine.
2016 Cabernet / 92 points / International Wine Review
More elegant than blockbuster, the 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon is an excellent wine. The bouquet is redolent of dark cassis complemented by notes of earth and underbrush. There’s a lovely, silky texture to the mouth filling palate and nice integration of blackberry fruit and toasted oak. The tannins are still youthful but ripe. A wine that will only improve with a couple of years bottle age.
2015 Cabernet Sauvignon / Nittany Epicurean
The wine showed a dark ruby almost opaque color. Blackberry, raspberry preserves, cassis, licorice, vanilla, oak and whiffs of eucalyptus all arrived on the nose. Black cherry, raspberry, vanilla, cassis, licorice, oak and eucalyptus followed on a palate teeming with black cherry. The wine was full-bodied and exhibited good length along with moderate tannins. This wine would be an ideal pair for a seared dry-aged New York strip steak.
2019 Petit Verdot / 92 Points / Oded Cohen
Nicely balanced with a nice mouthfeel and a teeth staining color. The mix of black and red fruits is very interesting. Tangy and rich. Good right out of the bottle and better with airtime. Drinking very nicely now, and will continue to age in the next 5 to 7 years.
