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Harlan Estate Vertical at The Naples Winter Wine Festival (Sep 2017)

The 2010 Harlan Estate is a total head-turner. Powerful, dense and exotically ripe – as so many wines are in this vintage – the 2010 dazzles with magnificent intensity. Baritone inflections run through the black cherry, graphite, smoke, tar and licorice flavors. Heat spikes at the end of what was generally a cold growing season…

Vintage Retrospective: The 2010 Napa Valley Cabernets (May 2020)

Saturated full ruby to the rim. Brooding scents of black fruits, licorice, minerals, menthol and forest floor. Dense, thick and utterly seamless but alive on entry, then powerful, delineated and penetrating in the middle palate, with licorice, mountain berry and mineral flavors carrying through an explosive, unflagging aftertaste. Utterly palate-staining, endless wine with great power…

Focus on California’s North Coast (May 2005)

Deep medium ruby. Knockout nose combines black raspberry, blackberry, candied violet, licorice pastille, black pepper and a suggestion of dusty earth. Like a liquid confection in the mouth: thick and sweet yet almost magically shapely and fresh. The longest, most inexorably palate-staining wine of my tour of the North Coast in early March: this lost…

2016 White Burgundy: Excellent, But Complicated (Sep 2018)

(only modest crop losses to frost and mildew here): Tight nose offers scents of mirabelle, grapefruit and anise. This, too, conveys an impression of creaminess, but is more concentrated than the Bourgogne Blanc in spite of the closer-to-normal vine yields here. Finishes with a firm edge that calls for a year or two of patience.

2016 White Burgundy: Excellent, But Complicated (Sep 2018)

(only modest crop losses to frost and mildew here): Tight nose offers scents of mirabelle, grapefruit and anise. This, too, conveys an impression of creaminess, but is more concentrated than the Bourgogne Blanc in spite of the closer-to-normal vine yields here. Finishes with a firm edge that calls for a year or two of patience.

Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 1921-2016 (Oct 2017)

Super-ripe black cherry, plum, smoke, licorice make a strong opening statement in the 2008 Pichon Lalande. The late harvest that year yielded a decidedly super-ripe, exotic Pichon Lalande with captivating inner sweetness and gorgeous textural finesse. Naturally, the 2008 is young. Very young. Even so, it is stunning. Readers looking for an under-the-radar vintage to…