Delas Hermitage Les Bessards 2015
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Dunnuck
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Winemaker Notes
Pair with red meats, rare or medium cooked - game, marinated meats, and spicy stews. The bottle should be opened 1 to 3 hours before drinking. This wine needs at least 3 years cellaring before it can open up its complexity. After this time, it should be decanted before serving.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The top cuvée from Delas is the 2015 Hermitage Les Bessards, and it's always 100% Syrah from the steep, broken granite soils of the Bessards lieu-dit. Aged 18 months in 30% new barrels, its purple/plum color is followed by a huge nose of blackcurrants, graphite, toasted spice, crushed rocks and saddle leather. Powerful, massively concentrated, and tannic, it has a broad, expansive, heavenly texture, a thick mid-palate (you could almost use a fork for this beauty), and a great finish. Despite the richness level, it stays balanced and graceful on the palate, and is never over the top or heavy. It's a perfect Hermitage that will start to shine with 4-5 years of bottle age and keep for three decades or more. Bravo!
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The top cuvée is the 2015 Hermitage les Bessards, which comes from the middle to lower portion of the steep, granite hillside known as Bessards, unquestionably one of the best terroirs for Syrah in the world. Its inky purple color is followed by a full-bodied, rich, thrillingly concentrated red that has huge tannin, bright acidity and a solid mid-palate concentration. It still tastes like it just came from the press and will need to be forgotten for a decade.
Rating: 95-97 -
James Suckling
The granitic Bessards character is strong here with dark slate and dark, lustrous blackberry and plum fruits on the nose. The palate has a swathe of fine, long and powerful, yet velvety, tannins. Oak is nicely integrated. Very fresh. A great wine. Drink from 2020.
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Wine Spectator
Polished and pure, with a beam of cassis and cherry preserves streaming through, flanked with floral and iron streaks. Long and refined through the finish, with pretty spice and apple wood details infusing the fruit flavor. Best from 2022 through 2035.
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Wine & Spirits
Delas Frères releases a wine from this patch of granite only in years the team considers outstanding. In 2015, the wine started with a two-day maceration before fermentation in open-topped vats; regular punch-downs and pump-overs further extracted even more flavor. It shows this extraction in its dark, inky scents and its sweet density; it feels thick in its concentrated purple fruit, with a full complement of oak from a year in new and one-year-old barrels. Rich and sumptuous, it telegraphs winemaking ambition and rarity.
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Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
One of the smallest and most important Syrah regions of northern Rhone, Hermitage is practically one single south-facing slope of crushed granite, thinly covered with varied, yet well-charted soil types. Many climats (well identified parcels) exist within Hermitage and while some smaller producers make single climat Syrahs, some larger ones blend to make one balanced expression of the appellation.
Though the AC regulations allow the addition of up to 15% white grapes to a red Hermitage, in practice it is usually made from Syrah alone. Winemaking is pretty traditional—or you might say historic—with hot fermentations and aging in older barrels of various sizes. The best wines, characterized by deep, dense and sexy flavors of black fruit, cocoa, licorice and tobacco, have massive textures and a solid 10-20 years aging potential.
The region of Hermitage is totally enclosed; the only place it could go really is to literally fall down its own hill into the city of Tain or the Rhone River. Soil erosion is a problem and terraces exist alongside the hill in order to keep the earth in place. Crozes-Hermitage encloses the region entirely to its north and south.
While Hermitage seems synonymous with some of the best Syrah on the planet, actually about one third of the wine produced here comes from white grapes. The full, lush and robust Marsanne or the less common, but almost more charming, Roussanne create wonderful whites in which the best have great potential for aging, like the reds.