Another great wine from Barnard Griffin. Lots of mocha and cherries in the nose and taste. Excellent balance and complexity.

Nose: Rich, mocha, vines/earth, hints of cherries on the finish. The mocha is more pronounced as it’s open longer. Very nice.

Taste: Very nice cherry flavors, soft tannins, meaty and earthy with a smooth mouthfeel. Lots of cherry flavors that migrate to more currant flavors as the wine is open.

Food: We paired this with a big pasta: a rotini with Field Roast Italian sausages with fennel and mustard greens. The wine was great with earthy cherries and mocha on the finish (more in the nose than the taste). Really jammy. The tannins balanced the food very well.

This is an excellent food wine . . . lovely in every sense.

A couple notes:

• You’d think from the many mentions of Field Roast products that we are affiliated with them. We’re not; we don’t know anyone there and we purchase their products just as you would. We use their products a lot in cooking because of their high quality and amazing flavors. And we serve them to our meat-eating friends who would swear they’re eating a regular meat sausage.
• In our tasting notes, we use the terms “vines” and “grapes” often. You don’t see those terms in typical wine reviews, so we want to be clear what we mean. If we were Wine Spectator, we’d probably use the word “terroir” (I think they get paid by the number of times they use it in an article). If you’ve ever walked through a vineyard, there are amazing aromas of the vines, earth and grapes. That’s what we mean. The sense of the vineyard, the smell of the plants and soil together.

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