2018 vintage notes
95 points Vinous: "Powerful red and blue fruit liqueur, potpourri, incense and smoky mineral scents, along with hints of cola, vanilla and exotic spices. Alluringly sweet and animated on the palate, offering concentrated raspberry, boysenberry, spicecake and floral pastille flavors and a strong undercurrent of zesty minerality. Fine-grained tannins frame and shape a broad, powerful, mineral-driven finish that lingers with superb persistence and building sweetness. Made with roughly 75% whole clusters and raised in new oak barrels."
The winery: This is what we consider on a year-in, year-out basis our most unique and exotic wine. This is, as always, our only wine that is made in 100% new Cadus barrels. This wine is a textural experience beyond any of our other wines. Rather than attempting to show, in pain-staking detail, the individual qualities of the vineyards we work with the Notorious bottling is about a particular style of wine that is richer, more intense, denser in texture and more lifted aromatically than our other bottlings.
In 2018 the eight selected barrels come from Balcombe Vineyard (4 barrels of Pommard planted in 1990 and fermented with 0%, 33% and 60% whole cluster from Blocks 1A, 1B and 2B), Estate Vineyard (2 barrels, 1 each from a 1990 planting of Pommard done with 50% whole clusters and from a 2001 planting of Dijon 114 from the Etzel Block done with 50% whole cluster ) and the vineyard we moniker as Mysterious (2 barrels, 1 each from a 1990 planting of Pommard done with 0% whole clusters and 100% whole cluster). These are all incredibly well farmed vineyard with 3 organic sites representing totality of fruit.