I’ve had a chance to taste a few - Carlisle “Piner Olivet,” A. Rafanelli, Scherrer OMV, Turley “Pesenti,” Martinelli “Guiseppe and Louisa” … 2016 and even 2017 were excellent, 2018 seems to be a cut above.
by the time 2108 is here, I will be gone, and so will my cellar!
Hope you are doing well, Mike. Perhaps we’ll do the summer trip up again this year and hit some stops with you as usual. We gotta get back to Champagne too this year, as we had to dump the trip next month given The 19.
We bought some Rafanelli and Carlisle from 2018, and look forward to trying them once we have them. You have some time traveling that you should share regarding the 2108’s!
I’m not concerned about the producers I buy from but Jeb Dunnuck went out of his way to say 2017 was a rough year for Zinfandel due to the extraordinarily hot vintage.
I loaded my locker with 2018 Zinfandel. The vintage is outstanding across the board. I’m still drinking my way through 14-15 releases I have on hand. Will be nice to try some 18s eventually.
Zin berries are very susceptible to heat spikes, where the berries attach to the stem. They will pull back from the stem and then it’s over. The berries that survived were very good but that required aggressive sorting. No sorting, no good.
Carlisle sorted 3 times. Once in the field then back at the winery. But Mike still wasn’t happy so he sorted again.
Agreed on the Carlisle. I tried many of these at the winery with Mike and think they were exceptional. He said he learned valuable lessons when there was a similar heat spike in the 2010 (?) vintage.