Tasting Notes
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REVIEW
Lots of red and blue fruits as well as peppery notes emerge from the 2021 James Berry Vineyard, a medium to full-bodied, pure, incredibly elegant expression of this vineyard. I love its fruit, balance, and length, and it shows the slightly fresher style of the vintage while still bringing terrific depth and richness. It's unquestionably a gorgeous wine in the making, but it’s going to warrant 2-4 years of bottle age.
I was able to taste three vintages from Saxum, the late release 2019s from bottle, the majority of the 2020 lineup from barrel, and a handful of 2021 barrel samples. As I wrote last year, the 2019s are just brilliant, ripe, hedonistic, magical wines, and these late releases only reinforce that opinion. Looking at the 2020s, this is clearly a challenging vintage, with many wines having subtle smoky nuances and firmer yet still ripe tannins. Justin commented that the lab numbers regarding smoke taint were very low, so I think these are safe wines that will offer plenty of pleasure, although this is not a vintage to hide in the cellar. The 2021s that I was able to taste were terrific, and this will clearly be another terrific vintage here. In addition, they’ve planted a new vineyard located just four miles off the Pacific, the Cayucos Ridge Vineyard, and I expect we’ll see more releases from that site in the future.