Vinous

• By Stephen Tanzer
  Washington: Various Shades of Hot (Oct 2017), 10/1/2017 (link)

  (K Vintners Syrah Motor City Kitty Washington Red) Subscribe to see review text.

Full Pull

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

  (K Vintners Syrah Motor City Kitty) 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: This is only the second time we’ve been able to access MCK. Last year’s allocations for the 2013 were *brutal*, and this year our parcel is 25% smaller. Yikes. No reviews yet for the ’14 (thank goodness), but that ’13 ended up nabbing a 96pt lovefest from Jeb Dunnuck. I’m going to offer Charles’ notes, and then stop there, because there’s just so little of this (we’re going to ask for max order requests of 2 bottles, but more likely allocations are single bottles, and I won’t be surprised if some folks are shut out entirely). From Charles: Deep and mouth filling. It opens with wet stone, dry herbs and a decidedly earthy palate. It gives way to tanned leather and cool fireplace ash. Long and compelling, it is my sole holiday release.