Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
With its compact nose of blackberry and cassis aromas, this wine comes across as ripe and modern. In the mouth, it’s round, bouncy, tannic and exuberant, but not overdone. Flavors of blackberry and fig are smooth, while the finish is rich and ready. Editors' Choice.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Along with the Viola bottling, the 2010 Franco is more earth-driven than other wines in the lineup, displaying iron-tinged, rustic aromas among an otherwise typical, dark-fruited, balsamic profile. The palate offers the slow-moving, graceful richness consistent with Maquis before finishing on a slightly hollow, drying note. While it remains a respectable expression of the property.
Cabernet Franc, a proud parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, is the subtler and more delicate of the Cabernets. Today Cabernet Franc produces outstanding single varietal wines across the wine-producing world. Somm Secret—One of California's best-kept secrets is the Happy Canyon appellation of Santa Barbara. Here Cabernet Franc shines as a single varietal wine or in blends, expressing sumptuous fruit, savory aromas and polished tannins.
Well-regarded for intense and exceptionally high quality red wines, the Colchagua Valley is situated in the southern part of Chile’s Rapel Valley, with many of the best vineyards lying in the foothills of the Coastal Range.
Heavy French investment and cutting-edge technology in both the vineyard and the winery has been a boon to the local viticultural industry, which already laid claim to ancient vines and a textbook Mediterranean climate.
The warm, dry growing season in the Colchagua Valley favors robust reds made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère, Malbec and Syrah—in fact, some of Chile’s very best are made here. A small amount of good white wine is produced from Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.