2008 | Verite | Le Désir

Musky aromas of blueberry, licorice and dusty spices. Dense and sappy, with terrific grip and saline intensity to the dark berry, dark chocolate, clove and mace flavors.

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: The fruit for this blend of 61% Cabernet Franc, 31% Merlot and the rest Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec came from Chalk Hill (58%) and Alexander Valley (42%). Pierre Seillan believes the Chalk Hill fruit provides a truffle-like character and the Alexander Valley gives minerality, structure, tannin and intensity. The 2008 will be fascinating to taste next to the 2007 over the next 30+ years. Sweet mulberry, blueberry and blackberry fruit intermixed with notions of black truffles, damp earth and forest floor emerge from this beauty of stunning intensity, purity and texture.

• Wine Enthusiast: The 2008 vintage presented challenges for Cabernet Sauvignon, but this Cabernet Franc-based blend succeeds wildly. It's bone dry, tannic and enormously complex, with flavors of sour-cherry candy, red currant, licorice and spicy cola. Ninety-five percent new oak lends this a wonderful toastiness. Few wines could handle that much new wood, but this one can. However, it's very tannic. You can drink it now, but it should blossom after 2014.

Producer Information

Vérité Winery is a wine producer based in Sonoma County in California. It is most famous for its three Bordeaux-styled blends: La Muse, La Joie, and Le Désir, which have all received 100-point scores from American wine critic Robert Parker over several vintages. Winemaker Pierre Seillan got his start working with Bordeaux varieties at his family's estate in Armagnac. Before moving to the United States, he worked at Château de Targé in Saumur-Champigny in the Loire Valley, and at several châteaux in Bordeaux. Upon meeting California wine pioneer Jess Jackson in the 1990s, Seillan was convinced to move to Sonoma to make Bordeaux blend wines. Vérité sources fruit from the Alexander Valley, Bennett Valley, Knights Valley and Chalk Hill AVAs in Sonoma County. This range of sites provides more than 40 different types of soil, a range of altitudes and several different mesoclimates. Each vineyard block is vinified separately before a final blend for each wine is created. In a slight departure from the standard approach, Seillan made a 100 percent Tannat from Alexander Mountain Estate (which sits on the western Mayacamas Mountains overlooking the Alexander Valley) in 2010, although it appears this wine was a one-off. The three Vérité blends are dominated by a different Bordeaux variety. La Muse is Merlot-based, La Joie is Cabernet Sauvignon-based, and Le Désir is primarily Cabernet Franc. Due to the wines' success with the press, they are only available through a mailing list. The wines are still made by Seillan, although he is now joined by his daughter, Hélène, who has taken over assistant winemaker duties. Jess Jackson died in 2011.

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