Like all wines these days, it has a perfect presentation - lush & smooth in the mouth, no sharp edges, nothing rustic - blah blah blah blah blah.
For the first few days, I was getting a little depressed, because it seemed that the entirety of the wine’s aromas & flavors was emanating from the oak treatment.
And yet I had this nagging feeling that there was some very nice Syrah fruit in there somewhere - I could kinda taste it right at the very rear of the palate, just as I was in the process of swallowing.
Then about Day 5, the wine started opening up, and I started to wonder whether maybe my hunch was correct.
The bottle probably peaked on Day 7, when it showed some very nice floral aromatics.
In all, I followed it for 11 days [starting on Thanksgiving], and it never did go skanky on me.
So I’m gonna go way out on a limb and predict that there’s enough of that magnificent 2016 fruit to outlive the oak treatment, and that the wine is worth risking in the cellar for several decades.
The only problem might be with the cork - it shattered after a couple of days - so I don’t know whether that brand of cork will hold out towards the 50-year mark.
But certainly the wine could always be served as a Gateway Drug to newbies who were only familiar with Cal Cabs [as a means of beginning to lure them over to The Dark Side].
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Plus it started out as a Thanksgiving wine [although we had had a bunch of Whites by the time we got to the Gaillard].
But it stubbornly refused to oxidize, which I always take as a very positive sign for cellaring.
Like I said, I was getting depressed for the first few days, because of the omnipresent influence of that oak treatment, but my goodness, there is some very nice 2016 fruit beneath the oak.
Plus, around here, the wine retails for a tenth or a twentieth [or even a THIRTIETH] of what the Northern-Rhone-Heads pay for the trendy stuff these days.
So it’s an affordable avenue for acquiring some quality 2016 fruit, even if it might be your grandchildren who get to enjoy the wine [after the oak treatment has finally been absorbed].
I agree that once the oak is neutralized, Gaillard makes some really enjoyable wine. They were selling their base Cote Rotie for €40 ex-cellar when I visited in 2017, which begs the question, “What in the ghost of Marius Gentaz are the cool kids spending €1200/bottle on these days in the Northern Rhône?”.
If you’ve got the patience to wait out the oak, then at current [horrifyingly stratospheric] Northern Rhone market prices, that is a whale of a lot of Syrah fruit for $5 per 100 ml.
2018 - 2003 = 15 years, which strikes me as about the bare minimum necessary for this 2016 to start absorbing its oak.
That would put you at 2016 + 15 = 2031 [last night I was thinking more like 2041], but if you’ve got the patience, my gut instinct is that there’s some very nice 2016 fruit lurking beneath all that oak.
