Now for the details. I brought this to our Super Bowl gathering, expecting it to be a bit of a sideshow, but from the first sip it was captivating. By the time Lady Gaga had finished the national anthem (so about 90 minutes after she started it) the wine was in full bloom with red cherry, loamy earth and a hint of flowers. The palate was perfectly balanced, and refreshingly vibrant. There was not a lot of change over the two hours (i.e. 5 sacks) I followed it, but it did numb the pain of the halftime show quite well. The last drops trickled away as the Panthers’ hopes fell to earth in the second half. The wine blew the game away.
Have you ever visited a wine producer and had a tasting that shaped your opinion completely in opposition with other wine nerds? Yeah, I’m sure some of you have. That happened to me with Littorai.
Littorai’s whites were very much to my taste and I walked out of there with a few bottles for BYOB opportunities on our west coast trip. However, the reds had little fruit and lots of structure, with the alcohol sticking out. Was it poor timing wrt bottle openings? Probably.
Anyway, maybe I’ll get to try again with the reds some day on another trip. I don’t mean to hijack the thread, but David’s note makes me regret that I didn’t get to taste the wines in the best shape possible.
Thanks for the note, David. I’m really not surprised. I’ve only had a few Littorai, but have found the appellation wines to be excellent.
Funny you say that, Chris. When I visited Littorai the Chard was too big and oaky for me, but the Pinots really blew me away. IMO, the best Caifornia Pinot being made today. To my palate just the slightest notch ahead of the bottles I’ve tasted from Rhys, Mount Eden, Arcadian, and Big Basin.
I think the SVDs often have too much fruit and oak to drink happily young, though with some fortunate exceptions. The Sonoma Coast and Larmes are MUCH more enjoyable in year 1. But I’ve had excellent aged Littorai SVDs, so I suspect they just need time. Even so, you’ll get some duds in the mix where the ripeness got away from them or the oak was too heavy, but the hit rate is much better than with other CA PN producers.
The need to age the Littorai SVDs is one the reasons I’m so skeptical of PN producers with no track records. If it wasn’t for the chance to look at the SVDs with 15 years of bottle age, the quality of the SVDs would be obscured by their grumpy youth.
My experience mirrors that of DavidZ. There are “fortunate exceptions” where the SVD pinots drink surprisingly well in their youth (the 2010 Hirsch, for example, was stunning out the gate), but these are for the most part 10+ year wines.
Thanks for the note David. I know I should still be buying these but have dropped off the list.
I too enjoy the SVDs pinots with about 10 years of age. The ones I’ve had younger I wouldn’t characterize as grumpy but as just too concentrated and rich for my palate. I like them when they thin out ever so slightly. I never had one with 15+ years.
The Littorai chards with age are sublime. While I’ve had a couple of 02 and 03 Mays Canyon that were shot, in general I have found they are still incredibly fresh and ratchet up the complexity to a whole new level. I’ve almost drunk through all my older Littorai chards and am on the hunt for some more.
I had this 2014 Sonoma Coast Pinot in a restaurant in SF a few weeks ago and agree with David. Very tasty, ready, youthful rich and great food wine. A fine QPR from Littorai and nice to have an early drinker.
The oldest bottle I had was a 16 year old Cerise (a 1999, tasted in 2015) that was absolutely outstanding. Wonderful, rich, lots of secondary+ development – exactly what I like to see in a well aged Pinot. I very much doubt that the newer ones I’ve bought will survive that long – the 5 and 10 year old bottles can be wonderful as well.
When I saw grumpy, Katrina, that’s what I mean: there’s just so much oak, so much fruit, that it’s not particularly enjoyable. Many of the young Littorai SVD show that way and then, based on my (limited) experience with older bottles, shed that with time.
Yep, that’s been my experience too. They play much better with food with some age too. 10yr old svd Littorai pinot + home-made Indian food (not hot-spicy but aromatically-spicy) is one of my favorite combos.
Hmm…I know I have become more oak tolerant in recent years (my sensory re-boot in 2010 made me less sensitive to oak, more sensitive to TCA and gave me the superpower to smell cilantro from miles away), but I don’t find Littorai wines remarkably oaky when released.
I, too, was more impressed with the reds when I visited a year ago. (I wasn’t as negative on the whites, but wasn’t moved by them.)
I found the reds quite taut – they didn’t throw themselves at you; they certainly were not fruit-forward. But I liked that and thought it boded well for their long-term aging. I thought the oak, and everything else, was all in balance on the reds.