2011 | Darioush | Merlot

The wine is brimming with vibrand dark fruits, plum and blackberry, with delightful aromas of savory herbs, black tea and allspice. Bitter-sweet coca and hazelnut spices from barrel aging along with small amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon and Franc all add lushness, complexity and texture to the final blend.

Reviews:

• Wine Enthusiast: The big tannin presence to this wine suggests cellaring through 2020–2021. Around its girth are herbal elements of sage and smoke, a core of rich, red fruit and mocha. It's both generous and complex.

• Connoisseurs Guide: Sweet oak rushes to the fore early on and remains a key player throughout this wine's length, and, while it brings more than a little creamy richness and sweet spice, it is matched step for step by very deep, impressively extracted, plum- and cherry-like fruit. The wine makes a deep bow to ripeness as its maker's efforts usually do, and it is hard to see much in the way of nuance or subtlety here, but fans of unbridled richness will find lots to like in the near term and even more after a half-dozen years have come and gone.

Producer Information

Owner Darioush Khaledi established the estate in 1997. He was born and raised in Iran, where his father made wine as a hobby. He immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, and founded a successful grocery store chain called KV Mart. On his 20th wedding anniversary, he visited Napa Valley with his wife, where they tried California wines for the first time, and decided to buy land and start a winery.

Darioush Winery is a California wine producer located off the Silverado Trail in Napa Valley. It is known as a "destination winery" in Napa for its dramatic Persian architecture. The flagship Cabernet Sauvignon label, Darius II, is the best known wine in a critically acclaimed range. Darioush owns vineyards across the Oak Knoll and Mount Veeder AVAs in the southern Napa Valley. This section of the valley was focused upon because of its cooler macroclimates, a rather unorthodox choice in the 1990s. The estate now comprises 120 acres (48.5 hectares) of vineyards.
These are planted mostly to Cabernet Sauvignon with Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Shiraz, Chardonnay, Viognier, and Sauvignon Blanc. These varieties make up Darioush's Signature Series, as well as a range of blended wines.
The flagship Darius II Cabernet Sauvignon currently has a waiting list for an allocation. It typically sees around 22 months in French oak with 80 percent new wood. Wildfires meant that there was no 2017 produced.

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