Best Wines Direct: 2001 St. Emilion Grand Cru Classe only $29.88!

To all Best Winers,

Here is a St. Emilion estate that has quietly gone about their business of making serious wine while avoiding all the 'hoopla'.

Located atop the infamous St. Emilion plateau sharing the same soils as neighbors La Gomerie, Grand-Mayne and Clos des Jacobins, this property has been with the same family since the 1800's. With 74 acres under vine (a pretty good size vineyard for a St. Emilion Grand Cru Classé), the family was, surprisingly, one of the first to practice biodynamic viticulture in Bordeaux.  They started in 1991, but abandoned it in favor of a more traditional, sustainable, organic viticulture.  Less cow horns in the ground, more compost on top of it.

We had bought and sold the wines from Château Laroze before and had become quite fond of this estate over the years.  Some would call the wine 'textbook', with a Merlot-buttressing 25% of Cabernet Franc making for a sturdier, complex wine.  Thus we were pretty curious to taste their 2001, from a heavily under-rated vintage in St. Emilion, when we heard some had come available direct from the Chateau.

We read Parker’s original barrel tasting note on the wine, which was actually very flattering, Parker stating, "...the 2001 Laroze is a real sweet fruit-driven, hedonistic offering that is all pleasure. This dark plum/ruby-colored wine is tasty, expansive, and pure." That seemed like a pretty good note to us, so we dove right in to see just where this wine had gone.

The answer? Nowhere and everywhere! Funny enough, our notes mirrored Parker's notes from almost a decade earlier. "Bigger, better, substantial. Delicious. Balanced. Sweet, chewy tannins." It was love at first taste.  But just to confirm our earlier tastings, we sat down again the other night with a fresh bottle now that it has been here resting for a few months.  Hard to believe, but it was even better than the one we tasted in Bordeaux, a sheer pleasure to drink and the type of showing that made several Best Wines crew members run to the warehouse to stash a few for themselves. A good call...

How many St. Emilion Grand Cru Classé wines with 10+ years in the bottle from a great vintage in the Right Bank and direct from the estates cellar do you expect to find in a given year… especially for under $30 dollars? If your answer was 'zero' you'd probably be right.

Why Buy this wine:

Kyle Meyer and Tristen Beamon, Proprietors, BestWinesOnline.com