Weekly Tasting Report (Feb 15-21, 2021): Innovation and interest
James tasting and interviewing with Tapiz last week, among the more than 400 wines tasted.
This report on wines rated last week covers a lot of ground from cult California reds and first growth Bordeaux whites to concrete-egg fermented Argentine Patagonia whites and mountain pinot noirs from Italy’s Alto Adige.
The top wines of the tastings in Hong Kong were the Bryant Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2018 and the Château Haut-Brion Pessac-Léognan Blanc 2018. Both wine estates are revered in their perspective regions for producing some of the best wines in the world. And they have incredible terroir in their own rights. Bryant is comprised of superb hillside vineyards on Pritchard Hill in Napa Valley and the winemaking team confirmed in a Tasting Interview that the 2018 was a triumph in meticulous viticulture and harvesting. They did dozens of individual picks of different plots to assure the grapes were perfectly ripe even though they have about a dozen acres of vineyards.
Meanwhile, Jean Philippe Delmas, head winemaker at Chateau Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut Brion, was impressed with his legendary terroir’s ability to produce fresh and Bordeaux-styled wines even in an extreme year like 2018, highlighting the incredible character of his gravelly soils and the micro-climates of his vineyards in the city of Bordeaux. “I have to say it’s very bizarre that even though the wine is very concentrated with very high IPT and high level of alcohol, they are still Bordeaux style. Still balanced and fresh, it’s almost a miracle,” he said. Check out the full video of our conversation here.
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- Far Mountain showed the elegance of US chardonnays with these polished and minerally bottles.
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- Cantina Girlan supplied some of our Italian tastings last week, with these fruity and fresh pinot noirs.
Napa’s Larkmead is also high up on the list. I was impressed with the center palate of their reds from 2018. The vintage is an excellent one and produced reds with finesse and elegance due to the long growing season and high levels of crop. Larkmead Winemaker Dan Pietroski said in a Tasting Interview that they have been working on filling in the center palate of the wines by picking slightly earlier and reducing the levels of alcohol in his wines. Stay tuned for the video. Whatever he did, his reds shows a a pretty depth and intensity and all this with less than 14 degrees alcohol. He also noted that they have slightly reduced prices to make their wines more affordable to more people and especially restaurants.
I also came away impressed from a Tasting Interview with Herve Dantan, cellarmaster at Lanson. The company has really turned around in the last decade to focus on the quality of its grapes, vineyards and wines from what was once a commodity Champagne. The Lanson Champagne Bio-Organic Brut NV highlights this with its own biodynamically grown, Demeter-certified vineyards making a thoroughly rich and layered Champagne from chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier that is dry and vinous and wonderfully suited for a range of cuisines. This is a dinner Champagne more than a bottle for an aperitif. Stay tuned for this video as well.
Another Tasting Interview video coming soon is with Argentine Matias Riccitelli, one of the most innovative winemakers in the country making dozens of different bottles from skin-contact chenins to balanced and cement egg-fermented trousseau. The latter is called “bastardo” in Argentina, and he doesn’t want to change the name. Whatever you call them, his wines are innovative and thought provoking. My wife Marie is in a fun post on my Instagram account with his bottle of Kung Fu Malbec from Mendoza, which is a delicious no sulfur-added, concrete-egg produced red in a fruity and layered style.
We have plenty more Argentine wine reviews coming out in the future with another thousand or so bottles to taste in Hong Kong. We also have a number of 2017 Barolos in this report with more to come in the future. The 2017 was a hot and dry vintage for northern Italy’s famous region but it produced surprisingly formed and balanced wines, nothing like the overly fruity 2003s or another year along those lines. The brother and sister team of Gaia and Giovanni Gaja commented on the quality of the 2017 in a just posted Tasting Interview video.
The variety and interest in last week’s tastings were enormous so I am sure you are going to find something fun and delicious to buy and drink. In the wines below. Subscribe to see the scores and tasting notes.
– James Suckling, editor