Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
The aromas of oysters and peaches combine beautifully with the blackberry and blackcurrant character. Black olives, too. Full-bodied, layered and very intense with chocolate, black fruit and an intense, savory finish. Best Bard ever. Try in 2020, but already so pretty.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2014 The Bard is a blend of 90% Cabernet Sauvignon and the rest Petit Verdot and Merlot. This is their largest cuvée of 2,000 cases. The wine shows exciting elegance, purity, a dense purple color, sweet black currant and blackberry fruit intermixed with licorice and charcoal. It is full-bodied, showing nice loamy forest floor notes. It also possesses a layered mouthfeel and terrific purity, texture and length. Drink it over the next 20+ years.
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Vinous
The 2014 The Bard is a heady, bombastic wine. Super-ripe black cherry, plum, leather and chocolate are all dialed up to the maximum. Overt and dense, with gorgeous richness, the 2014 has a lot to offer. This has opened nicely with time in bottle, more so than I had originally envisaged.
Undoubtedly proving its merit over and over, Napa Valley is a now a leading force in the world of prestigious red wine regions. Though Cabernet Sauvignon dominates Napa Valley, other red varieties certainly thrive here. Important but often overlooked include Merlot and other Bordeaux varieties well-regarded on their own as well as for their blending capacities. Very old vine Zinfandel represents an important historical stronghold for the region and Pinot noir is produced in the cooler southern parts, close to the San Pablo Bay.
Perfectly situated running north to south, the valley acts as a corridor, pulling cool, moist air up from the San Pablo Bay in the evenings during the hot days of the growing season, which leads to even and slow grape ripening. Furthermore the valley claims over 100 soil variations including layers of volcanic, gravel, sand and silt—a combination excellent for world-class red wine production.