Weekly Tasting Report (May 24-30, 2021): A famous star from Napa Valley, Billecart-Salmon’s prestige rosé and a unique, wild blend from Chile

The array of top wines in this week’s report is incredibly vast, with top-scoring bottles from Napa Valley, Mosel Valley, Champagne, Colchagua Valley, Wachau, St.-Emilion, Willamette Valley, Maipo Valley and Barolo. In total, we rated more than 600 wines last week!

Perhaps the star was the famous Dominus Napa Valley 2018. The wine shows incredible complexity and depth with a refinement and harmony that builds every second on your palate. The finish literally goes on for minutes. It’s a weightless wine where your feel the tannins across the palate but you really don’t see them. It is a reference point for the great 2018 vintage for Napa Valley.

“It’s incredible,” Dominus winemaker Tod Mostero said by Zoom. “It opens like a flower. It blossoms. It is a fascinating wine. I like those wines that keep you guessing … oh my goodness, the balance!

“It has been a new reference for me,” he added. “I think this could be my favorite Dominus. It was a discovery. A wine like this isn’t in your face. It’s not like 2013 [a wine I rated 100 points] … when you say that it is obviously great. This isn’t. This is secretly great”

Mostero’s three other 2018 Napa reds are also in this report: Ulysses, Napanook and Othello. You may not know Othello, which is the third wine of Dominus and only sold outside of the United States.

I had a long session with Mostero on the 2018 growing season, which is a new benchmark for Napa Valley. As he put it, we “geeked out” for about 15 minutes when talking about what really happened during the growing season. The bottom line is that it was very mild, with warm weather during most of the winter and spring. Plus it was a later harvest because the vine growth started late, with most wineries picking for their reds in October.

“We had no heat spikes in 2018,” he said. “The highest temperature we had in July, August and September was 97 degrees [36.1 degrees Celsius]. It was nothing.”

The weather was also relatively mild in 2008 in Champagne, which is why it is one of the great vintages for the region and also why the recently released prestige rosé bottling from Billecart-Salmon is so amazing – the Billecart-Salmon Champagne Cuvée Elisabeth Salmon Brut Rosé 2008. I loved the combination of ripe strawberry and iron character with a pastry shop undertone on both the nose and palate. I can’t wait to drink it again.

“The 2008 is a classic vintage and so classic that we don’t have them anymore,” Mathieu Roland-Billecart, the president of Champagne Billecart-Salmon, said via Zoom.  “It has freshness and salinity. They [the wines] are not the biggest but they are long.”

This description of long and linear could also be used for the highest scoring Chilean wine in this report – Emiliana Valle de Colchagua Los Robles Estate Gê 2018. It’s the second time for this wine to be such incredible quality and it’s made from biodynamic grapes. It’s a wild yet refined red made from a unique blend of syrah, carmenere and cabernet sauvignon. Our annual report on Chile with more than 1,000 wine ratings will be posted on Wednesday.

There’s also a review for the second bottling of the Rothschilds’ (Mouton-Rothschild) new wine in Chile – Baron Philippe de Rothschild Chile Valle de Maipo Baronesa P. 2019 – which is clearly at the same level as the first release and shows a consistency and verve from the blend of mostly cabernet sauvignon with some carmenere, petit verdot, cabernet franc and syrah. I spoke to Philippe Sereys de Rothschild by Zoom and he explained how the unique terroir in the Maipo Valley gives them more linear, brighter and fresher fruit character to this unique wine, which is named after his late mother.

Thinking of Bordeaux, we also posted a few latecomers in my massive report on 2020 Bordeaux en primeur, which highlights the greatness of the third outstanding vintage in a row for France’s most famous wine region. One to know is the Chateau Beausejour Duffau-Lagarrosse, which delivered a beautiful 2020 emphasizing the more vertical character of what wines from the revered property can be. The new winemaker Josephine Duffau-Lagarrosse told me that she wanted to emphasize the excellent quality of the cabernet franc on the small estate next door to Chateau Canon in the 2020, and she certainly achieved this even though it only equals about 18% of the blend with the rest in merlot.

We also have finally started posting our notes on Oregon, with three vintages represented – 2019, 2018 and 2017. We are waiting to hear which year Contributing Editor Nick Stock thinks is the best.

Meanwhile, we are now tasting hundreds of Washington state wines here in Hong Kong. This report has a couple of favorites from Cayuse Vineyards, including the Cayuse Vineyards Grenache Walla Wall Valley Edith Rose 2019 and the Cayuse Vineyards Walla Walla Valley God Only Knows Armada Vineyard 2018. Stay tuned for many more ratings in the future.

The same is true with Austria, which Senior Editor Stuart Pigott is rating at the moment. He says that the 2019 continues to have many excellent wines, but he questions if some are a little overripe. What will 2020 bring?

We have also included the tasting notes from Pigott from a fascinating vertical wine tasting from a lost wine estate in Germany’s Mosel Valley: von Othegraven. It was bought not that long ago by a famous German television presenter, Gunther Jauch, and they tasted back to the glorious 1959 vintage. His new wines are very impressive. Check out the story we just posted on Monday.

Finally, I am catching up on my 2017 Barolo tastings and I should be done by the end of the week. We will have almost 400 ratings, with about three-quarters on the 2017. This is turning out to be a big surprise for everyone with how bright and fresh the Barolos are despite such a dry and warm vintage. Some great wines are posted below.

I hope you find many excellent surprises in this week’s list. More to come as always.

– James Suckling, Chairman/Editor In Chief

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The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the previous week by James and 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.