Mild sweet rose wine — 9 years ago
Very sweet dessert wine. Tastes great chilled. — 10 years ago
LaFou is a small producer in the Terra Alta region of Spain, one I was lucky to visit on a recent trip to the Catalan. An expressive, fruit-driven blend of old vine Garnacha Negra and Garnacha Carignan—it's heavily laden in pie cherries, strawberries roasted in balsamic, olive tapenade, and warm spice. Intense and concentrated in the mouth, here red fruit is lifted by a jolt of bright acidity at the center, a vortex that dwindles to complex flavors of sweet tobacco, Yankee Candle and Christmas Pudding. — 8 years ago
Best way to beat the Polar Vortex...denial — 10 years ago
Surprisingly smooth with great lingering flavor. — 11 years ago
Take that vortex of cold air. Pure unadulterated happiness. -DM — 11 years ago
Oh my. Bright, flinty red fruit in the nose. Incredibly herbal and rustic but balanced. It tastes like the hot, southern Oregon clime it came from. Lovely.
This wine might just sustain me through the polar vortex that has settled over Oregon. — 8 years ago
This is better today than it was two days ago, when first opened. Promising then, but impenetrable and showing some wood toast on the veneer. That's gone now. It's still a structured vortex of a wine, so tight it's practically turned itself inside out, but the flavors have gotten more expressive even with that forbidding structure. It's got a nice mix of apply orchard fruit with pleasantly bitter blackberry putting it in a much deeper, blacker pitch, which together with some gravelly minerality hints at the tarry flavors that'll come out in a few years. — 10 years ago
2011. Interesting this. Trying to hard to be fruity, but ultimately cannot escape the dominant vortex of Gruner's savory side. Definitely ripe at 14.5%, the wine is almost completely botrytis free. Pure, ripe green citrus (kefir, yuzu) as well as a steady tempo mid-line of ripe yellow and green apple, on the fringes lurk stranger tropical notes: pineapple rind, kiwi skin, green banana and green mango. There's that radish-and-lentil savoriness, shiso, fresh basil, tarragon. Chinese five spice chimes in (maybe the botrytis?) and pleasant Asprin-like bitterness on the back palate. There's an additional chemical note (SO2-related?) that reminds me of riesling's petrol, but it's really more like if someone had tried to turn the flavor of municipal pool water into a food, like a not unappealing chlorine snack. I know that's really weird, but it's what it made me think of...big without being baroque, and kept together by the acid and bitterness. Not a shy wine. The ambition and quality are obvious, but it's not harmonious at the moment. — 10 years ago
Young but very drinkable. Juicy and bright, not overpowering. — 12 years ago
Alishia Odom
Alishia had this 8 years ago