Opus One Icons and Setting the Gold Standard in Tuscany and Chile: Weekly Tasting Report (April 20-26)

Great modern icon wines always seem to be of exceptional quality, regardless of their origins. JamesSuckling.com rated some of these world-class standard-bearers over the past week, including Masseto, Seña and Opus One. The latter is perhaps “the” great icon wine of a generation (especially mine) considering its first vintage was 1979 and it was founded by the late greats of Bordeaux and Napa Valley – Baron Philippe de Rothschild (Mouton Rothschild) and Robert Mondavi.

I am in the process of reviewing almost every vintage of Opus One with winemaker Michael Silacci. He rolled out all the early vintages of Opus from 1979 to 1990 in a tasting at the winery a little over a week ago and it was impressive how well the wines were aging. There was not a bad bottle in the lot. In fact, one of my favorite wines was the first vintage of Opus, the 1979. It showed such grace and beauty for an old wine, with all the autumnal and tobacco character one could hope for in an aged cabernet sauvignon-based red.

Silacci said that the winemakers of Mouton were given the run of the vineyards of the Robert Mondavi Winery at the time and that the French choose some of the best grapes that were going into the Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon Reserves. It’s interesting that I have drunk the 1979 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve a number of times in the last three years and the wine is as equally fresh and vivid as the Opus One 1979 after all these years, although it lacks some of the complexity and polish of the Opus.

“I have been waiting for the 1979 and 1980 to go down but they never do,” Silacci said after he tasted both vintages.

What is striking when tasting the old wines with the newest releases is that they resemble one another in nature and pedigree. There’s an almost essence of To Kalon character to the wine with the ripeness and generosity yet firmness and form.

“Opus took what it wanted in the beginning,” Silacci said with a big, warm grin during the tasting. This meant it was made from the vineyard of To Kolan, which remains arguably the most famous vineyard in Napa Valley.

Part of To Kolan still goes into Opus although the winery only uses vineyards it planted or acquired for the project. Today, the acreage of vineyards equals about 170, with four distinct areas including To Kalon South, To Kalon North, River Parcel, and Ballestra.

For the record, this year’s release of Opus One – 2019 – is a classic wine with the purity and beauty of the best of the vintage. It’s at the same level of quality as the 2018 but slightly purer in fruit and focus. It will be released in September.

Italy’s iconic merlot, Masseto, is of equally compelling quality in 2019 and I sensed a fine-tuning in the wine, with its meticulously polished tannins and superb length and complexity. We often speak about how great merlot is in Tuscany, but only a handful of producers reach the level of the best of Pomerol, which remains the holy grail for merlot. Masseto sets the gold standard in Tuscany for the grape.

Gold standards for the best reds of Chile are certainly set by the winery of Seña, which incidentally was created by Robert Mondavi and Eduardo Chadwick after the success with Opus One. The winery is now wholly owned by Chadwick. I have been to the wine estate a number of times over the last seven years and it’s a breathtaking mountainside vineyard with terraces and biodynamically farmed vines. I always think that the touch of malbec in the wine makes the difference and gives it a just enough ripeness and softness in the center palate. It also nearly always gives a balsamic note to the wine like it has in 2020 – the wine rated in this report.

We also rated the new second wine of Seña, the Rocas de Seña Valle de Aconcagua 2020. We appreciated its openness and elegance – what Chadwick told Senior Editor Zekun Shuai was its “Mediterranean personality.” This is a fun wine to buy and drink while you wait for the first wine to open with age in your cellar.

Chadwick’s Errazuriz Las Pizarras range of wines from the Aconcagua coast also shined through in Chile’s 2020 vintage. The pinot and chardonnay show a little more volume and generosity than previous cooler vintages, but they are still very retained, chalky and elegant. The syrah was equally mesmerizing, underscored by its precision and polish.

Another wine not to miss in this report is Spain's Lustau Jerez Amontillado VORS. Our editors in our Hong Kong office have been tasting some exceptional sherries at the end of each tasting day, and we have found a few great examples. This incredibly complex yet refined Amontillado “saca," which has an average age of over 30 years, is a sublime expression of Amontillado that shows the refined tangy flavors of biological aging as well as layers and layers of subtle complexity coming from the long oxidative aging process.

We know outstanding sherries easily last for minutes on the finish, but this Amontillado is simply endless, going on and on with flavors that bring out a lot of emotions, too. It’s sad that sherry is still one of the most underappreciated wine categories today even with all the sherry aficionados everywhere in the world. This is the one you should keep an eye out for.

Finally, I rated one of our first 2019 Barbarescos and it already sets a high standard for the vintage after the inconsistency of the 2018 vintage. Or course it was from one of the best vineyard sites and one of the best producers, Bruno Giacosa. The Bruno Giacosa Falletto Barbaresco Asili 2019 shows that Barbaresco is onto an excellent vintage, with plenty of body and ripe tannins as well as terroir-specific character and structure.

We rated more than 800 wines for this report, with many areas covered, from New York’s Finger Lakes to many of the top appellations of Chile, not to mention California, Piedmont and Hungary. Check out all the tasting notes below.

– James Suckling, Chairman/Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.