| Score: |
97 RP.
"The 2013 Proprietary Red LMV Salon, which is a proprietary red of 74% Cabernet Sauvignon and 26% Cabernet Franc, is stunning. The Cabernet Franc seems to give this wine a tremendous fragrance, as the opaque purple color offers notes of cedar wood, underbrush, forest floor and spring flowers along with creme de cassis and black cherries. With a full body, ripe texture and moderately high tannins, this wine will benefit from 4-5 years of cellaring and keep 30-35 years. This famous, historic estate, highly renowned in the late 1800s, sits to the north of St. Helena and to the south of Calistoga. It is a valley-floor vineyard of 110 acres that has been divided into a hierarchy of quality. The lineup of wines for now remains the same. They have had an incredible run of great successes at Larkmead, with the 2013s easily the match for the impressive 2012s. The red wines include six cuvées from the estate vineyards, with three of them designated by white labels, while their most expensive and limited cuvées are designated with a black label. The three Black Label wines are about as good as Cabernet Sauvignon can be. The good news is that the 2014 Larkmead White Label wines will be definitely among the more attractive 2014s at high, but relatively realistic price points for world-class Napa Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines. Cam Baker, the proprietor of Larkmead, told me that the 2013s were off the analytical charts in terms of extract, tannin levels and color density, whereas the 2014s were about 25% less on all the indices of power, strength, color and extract, but they’re still very concentrated wines." Robert M. Parker, Jr., Wine Advocate #221, Oct 2015 |