2014 L'Ecole No. 41 Merlot Estate Walla Walla Valley

• By Stephen Tanzer
  Washington: Various Shades of Hot (Oct 2017), 10/1/2017, (See more on Vinous...)

  (L'ecole No. 41 Merlot Estate Washington Red) Login and sign up and see review text.

Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Something Old, Something New, Something Both, 11/16/2017

  (L'Ecole No. 41 Estate Merlot) Hello friends. I love writing about L’Ecole No. 41. Not only because they’re Washington stalwarts who have been doing it – and doing it well – for a very long time, but also because they offer a roadmap for how Washington wineries can mature and evolve and maintain relevance. I feel like Marty Clubb and his team nail a few important principles: 1. It all starts with the land. Focus on estate vineyards. 2. Stay loyal to the vineyards and wines that brought your initial success, but don’t be afraid to expand and innovate. 3. Quality will out. Trust your own assessment of quality more than the whims of fashion, and that good enough wines will always find a market. Today we’re offering a trio of wines that encapsulate these principles; one from an old estate vineyard, one from a new estate vineyard, and one wine that combines the two.One of the best aspects of judging the Great Northwest Invitational each year is getting to blind taste, fall in love with certain wines, and then later find out what they are. This year, my favorite Merlot by far, and perhaps my favorite red wine of the whole competition, turned out to be L’Ecole’s Estate Merlot. What’s fascinating about this wine is that it is a blend of the old and the new estate vineyards: 40% Seven Hills fruit paired with 60% Ferguson. There are 10% dollops of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc in the mix, and the wine spent 18 months in French oak, 40% new. It clocks in at 14.5% listed alc and kicks off with a nose of red plum, violet, and good clean soil tones. All three of these wines seem to effortlessly offer an attractive balance of fruit and earth elements. This is dusty Merlot, both in flavor and in the quality of the tannins. All silk and succulence on the attack and mid-palate, it’s near the finish where those tannins pick up, robust and delicious. It’s no surprise to me that the best market for this wine is the UK. The Brits didn’t obsess over the movie Sideways the way we did in the States, and their reference point for Merlot is right-bank Bordeaux. They never had insipid Cali dreck foisted on them the way so many of us did. I’m beginning to feel the flutterings of a Merlot revival, though, and I’m hoping it turns out to be one of the stories of 2018. We saw solid numbers for last month’s ten-dollar Rook Merlot, so let’s move up the ladder a few rungs, and see what kind of quality and complexity a Merlot in the $30s gets you from a reliable winery like L’Ecole. I can tell you that in a blind setting, it was a total superstar.