2008 Errazuriz Carménère Kai

Community Tasting Notes (6) Avg Score: 89.7 points

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  12/24/2015 - Dovberg Likes this wine: 92 Points

  Much better and evolved since last bottle.
  
  Distingquished notes of Carmenere: lots of nettles, smoked red pepper, dark cherries and coconut oil. Some roses, pear, cinnamon and pentachlorbenzene.
  
  Heady, powerful on the palate. Black pepper, smoked red pepper, and candied dark cherries. Good gripping minerals in the aftertaste. Best Carmenere I ever had.

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  9/17/2013 - forceberry wrote: 78 Points

  The handpicked grapes are sourced from the Max vineyard, planted between 1992 and 1993. The grape skins were macerated in the wine for approx. one month, after which the wine was transferred to French oak barrels (98% new) to age for 20 months.
  
  Opaque, bloody black-red color. You can see the concentration from miles away. Very massive, opulent and sweet nose with aromas of heavily toasted oak, spices, roasted bell peppers, jammy dark fruits like figs, dates and prunes, some savory wood tones, hints of acrid bitterness and a touch of alcohol. On the palate the wine is mouth-fillingly full-bodied, inky and chewy with intense, sweet flavors of dark fruits, jammy red fruits, roasted spices, vanilla, cocoa, some cooked bell pepper and hints of eucalyptus. The acidity is way too low for a wine this big, emphasizing the jammy sweetness and making the wine feel excessively soft and blowzy. There is a little bit of tannic firmness, but not enough to give the wine any actual structure. The flavor of alcohol is masked by the rich fruit, but the alcohol heat isn't. The wine finishes with a warm, even hot aftertaste with long, juicy and quite sweet flavors of overripe blueberries, stewed strawberries and lots of extracted oak flavors like cacao paste, vanilla, toasty wood smoke, cedar and milk chocolate.
  
  What one should get out of a wine like this? Sure, there is a lot of everything, but it seems that the winemakers have been trying to make a wine that would be the world's best only by cramming it as full of everything as it is physically possible. This wine feels like somebody would try to make a radio hit by mixing all the choruses from the top 40 singles into one three-minute song. All played together. With lots of compression and reverb. Just like this hypothetical song, this wine just doesn't make sense. This is an overdone giga-Carménère with no notion of structure or balance whatsoever. Enough aging might make the wine lose some of its baby fat and sweetness, but even long-term cellaring can't fix the wine's lack of structure. An outrageous rip-off at 95,70€.

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  9/17/2013 - avp wrote:

  Open and opulent nose of ripe berries, chocolate, tobacco and some bell pepper.
  Full bodied and sweetish palate with a little tannic bite coming through the flabby layers. Bell pepper, orange peel and graphite.
  Just too massive and formless. And expensive. Nice varietal expression though.

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  8/1/2013 - Dovberg wrote:

  Did not take any notes. A clean, fine Carmenere but I had higher expectations due to the big price tag. Too young perhaps?
  
  Have one bottle left. Time will tell I guess

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  3/1/2013 - JS1056 Likes this wine: 95 Points

  Had at a Chilean Tasting. I am note a carmenere fan but this was a fantastic wine. The nose was big with a lot going on with spices and some dark fruits.
  The oak and vanilla were prominent along with cherry and berry and the tannins were as smooth as silk. Best wine of the tasting by far.
  I don't know how this will age but it was so good now I would drink up.

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