Didn’t see a thread for this. Got an email today for the fall release:
Our Fall 2020 wine allocations will be available on Tuesday, July 14th at 9:00 am PST. This release is for our 2018 Single Vineyard Pinot Noirs, 2018 Hudson Vineyard Chardonnay, and our Appellation Chardonnays, 2018 Carneros and 2019 Russian River. The reviews of our 2018 Single Vineyards have been published in the Press section of our website.
This will be my first release. I’m looking forward to it! I’m aware that Aubert is generally fantastic, but are there any standouts this year?
Congrats on your first release! It definitely makes a dent on the bank account, but they always have great wines. I was happy to get onto the list in college. I took a little break from my allocation and just got back on to years ago. I am looking forward to this year. I’m not sure about standouts this year though. They are basically almost always solid. Chards are especially well regarded and I think their pinots are almost just as good personally.
I too will be offered my first allocation…in the Spring I wasn’t offered an allocation but was offered a 3 bottle offer which I gladly accepted…really looking forward to the Pinot!
In this day and age of calendar creep where Christmas ads start appearing before Halloween, it was inevitable that we would see a “fall” offer in mid-July, more than two months before the autumnal equinox.
The offering period for Aubert’s fall release has opened in mid-July since the offering for the 2008 Pinot Noirs in July 2010 (with the exception of the 2011 offering on 2 August). Since the wines aren’t “released” - shipped or available for pick up - until late October at the earliest, calling it a Fall Release doesn’t seem too outrageous to me.
Contrarian viewpoint - while I love their chards, not a fan of the PNs. I just opened several of the 2012s over the past couple of months. All were syrupy and heavy alcohol. These are big wines and I didn’t find much complexity.
Not my experience at all with the few '12s and '13s we’ve opened in the past six months or so. I found the wines far more restrained than one might expect from Aubert and wouldn’t consider them syrupy or hot at all. One’s not likely to confuse them with the current renditions of Pinot Noir from producers like Rhys, but neither are they like the overblown CA Pinots from the 1st decade of this century.
Except for a few bottles here and there, Aubert is pretty much the only white wine I buy outside of Burgundy, and my white Burgundy purchases have really slowed down over the last decade (PremOx is alive and well).