Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Year in and year out, this is one of the most challenging wines we taste. It never fails to skirt the edge of excess, and just when we are sure that it can not escape, it delivers a rich and polished passage on the palate with an amazing amount of highly ripe, entirely alive fruit that balances the assertive tannins and comes with enough acid energy to keep itself together for drinking now if that is your wont and cellaring for a half decade or more for those who prefer that route. Its combination of power and good manners makes it a winner again
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2006 Relentless may be even better. It possesses an opaque purple hue as well as a grapy, smoky perfume displaying scents of roasted meats, blackberries, licorice, and charcoal. This packed and stacked, full-bodied 2006 should drink beautifully for 10-15 years.
Barrel Sample: 92-94 Points -
Wine Enthusiast
Another outstanding Relentless from Shafer. As usual, the wine is massively constructed and extraordinarily rich and deep in flavor, offering waves of grilled blackberries and cherries, red currants, licorice, bacon, cola, black pepper and other spices. The tannins are very big, but completely ripe and sweet. Mainly Syrah, with 16% Petite Sirah, this wine will age, but it's really best now with hearty foods, like short ribs or lamb.
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.