JamesSuckling.com

• By James Suckling
  3/19/2018 (link)

  (K Vintners Syrah Walla Walla Valley Powerline Estate, Red, United States) Subscribe to see review text.

Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Instant Gratification 3 of 8: Top 100 #s 2 and 13 (+WSET UPDATE), 12/18/2017

  (K Vintners Syrah Powerline Estate Vineyard) Holiday Pickup Schedule REMINDER: Please take note of our schedule below for the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018: Dec 21-23: Open 11am-7pm Dec 28-30: CLOSED Jan 4-6: CLOSED Jan 11-13: Open 11am-7pm ---- WSET UPDATE: Please join me in congratulating Full Pullers Pat Malloy, Dylan Joffe, and Emme Brown, who all passed the WSET Level 2 exams they took in November. Well done, team! ---- Hello friends. As you can see from the schedule above, we have just three more pickup days remaining in 2017. The past few days, we’ve been instituting a new series of offers to close out the year: our Instant Gratification series. Today makes the 3rd in the series, and possibly one of the most exciting (and probably frenzy inducing). Like the previous offers, both wines below are already in the warehouse and ready for immediate pickup. No need to wait until mid-January; these wines are here, delicious, and looking for happy homes for the holidays. Whether you believe in it or not, karma can feel very real in the wine business. Obviously, bad actions can bring about bad results, but we’re not here to focus on the negative today. We’re here to focus on the positive side of Karma. Karma is really just cause and effect—what you do in the world impacts what happens do you. For example, it’s never more clear that we are doing good work here at Full Pull than when we receive access to highly-desirable, completely-sold-out, top-scoring wines.We originally offered this wine well before it landed the #2 spot on Wine Spectator’s Top 100 wines of 2017. Typically, this type of accolade means that every bottle still available gets gobbled up immediately. Full Pull (or at least a few of our list members) must have done something karmically good over the past eight years, because Charles Smith and his team were kind enough to offer us a second parcel of the highly lauded wine. Wine Spectator Top 100 (#2): “The first Syrah release from a new vineyard, Powerline is a bold statement from winemaker Charles Smith. But what do you expect from the bad boy of Washington wine? Located just south of Walla Walla at an elevation of 1,200 feet, the 30-acre vineyard was planted by Smith in 2012. The site is an ancient riverbed containing well-drained soils, thick with cobblestones, sand and gravel, that produce about 2.5 tons per acre. Smith fermented the 2014 with native yeast and soaked it on the skins for 41 days before aging the wine 27 months in French puncheons, 53 percent of them new oak.” Wine Spectator: Copyrighted material withheld. Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. Notes on logistics: 1. I suspect we’ll have to under-allocate here, given the parcel sizes, so a quick reminder of our allocation technique: Our allocations favor breadth over depth, so that everyone gets one bottle before anyone gets two. And our formula for prioritizing allocations includes overall orders, frequency of orders, recency of orders, and list tenure, among other factors. 2. We’ll run our initial allocation at noon Pacific time tomorrow (Tuesday). 3. If you’ve already placed a reorder request that’s in Pending, no need to order again; we’ll consider your request along with everyone else’s.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull K Vintners, 7/28/2017

  (K Vintners Syrah Powerline Estate Vineyard) Hello friends. We have a K extravaganza today, with two new wines from Charles Smith’s family of wineries, and two reoffers for spring-offered wines that received excellent reviews from Tim Fish’s recent Wine Spectator set. With four wines on offer, we’ll keep the blurbs short, and we’ll get right to it:We originally offered this wine well before it landed the #2 spot on Wine Spectator’s Top 100 wines of 2017. Typically, this type of accolade means that every bottle still available gets gobbled up immediately. Full Pull (or at least a few of our list members) must have done something karmically good over the past eight years, because Charles Smith and his team were kind enough to offer us a second parcel of the highly lauded wine. Wine Spectator Top 100 (#2): “The first Syrah release from a new vineyard, Powerline is a bold statement from winemaker Charles Smith. But what do you expect from the bad boy of Washington wine? Located just south of Walla Walla at an elevation of 1,200 feet, the 30-acre vineyard was planted by Smith in 2012. The site is an ancient riverbed containing well-drained soils, thick with cobblestones, sand and gravel, that produce about 2.5 tons per acre. Smith fermented the 2014 with native yeast and soaked it on the skins for 41 days before aging the wine 27 months in French puncheons, 53 percent of them new oak.” Wine Spectator: Copyrighted material withheld. Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. Notes on logistics: 1. I suspect we’ll have to under-allocate here, given the parcel sizes, so a quick reminder of our allocation technique: Our allocations favor breadth over depth, so that everyone gets one bottle before anyone gets two. And our formula for prioritizing allocations includes overall orders, frequency of orders, recency of orders, and list tenure, among other factors. 2. We’ll run our initial allocation at noon Pacific time tomorrow (Tuesday). 3. If you’ve already placed a reorder request that’s in Pending, no need to order again; we’ll consider your request along with everyone else’s.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull K, 4/7/2017

  (K Vintners Syrah Powerline Estate Vineyard) Hello friends. We have small parcels of a quartet of rarities from the recent set of releases from Charles Smith’s wine empire. These offers are notorious for turning into feeding frenzies, and this one – our first of the year – promises to be extra cuckoo given the wines involved and the parcel sizes. So let me first offer two quick notes: 1. To the best of my knowledge, we have retail dibs on all of these wines west of the mountains. 2. I suspect we’ll have to under-allocate here, given the parcel sizes, so a quick reminder of our allocation technique: Our allocations favor breadth over depth, so that everyone gets one bottle before anyone gets two. And our formula for prioritizing allocations includes overall orders, frequency of orders, recency of orders, and list tenure, among other factors. Now, onto the wines: We originally offered this wine well before it landed the #2 spot on Wine Spectator’s Top 100 wines of 2017. Typically, this type of accolade means that every bottle still available gets gobbled up immediately. Full Pull (or at least a few of our list members) must have done something karmically good over the past eight years, because Charles Smith and his team were kind enough to offer us a second parcel of the highly lauded wine. Wine Spectator Top 100 (#2): “The first Syrah release from a new vineyard, Powerline is a bold statement from winemaker Charles Smith. But what do you expect from the bad boy of Washington wine? Located just south of Walla Walla at an elevation of 1,200 feet, the 30-acre vineyard was planted by Smith in 2012. The site is an ancient riverbed containing well-drained soils, thick with cobblestones, sand and gravel, that produce about 2.5 tons per acre. Smith fermented the 2014 with native yeast and soaked it on the skins for 41 days before aging the wine 27 months in French puncheons, 53 percent of them new oak.” Wine Spectator: Copyrighted material withheld. Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. Notes on logistics: 1. I suspect we’ll have to under-allocate here, given the parcel sizes, so a quick reminder of our allocation technique: Our allocations favor breadth over depth, so that everyone gets one bottle before anyone gets two. And our formula for prioritizing allocations includes overall orders, frequency of orders, recency of orders, and list tenure, among other factors. 2. We’ll run our initial allocation at noon Pacific time tomorrow (Tuesday). 3. If you’ve already placed a reorder request that’s in Pending, no need to order again; we’ll consider your request along with everyone else’s.