2016 Purlieu Cabernet Sauvignon Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard

Community Tasting Notes (5) Avg Score: 94.3 points

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  8/12/2023 - tomoem Likes this wine: 95 Points

  Aromatics of blackberry, cedarwood, and a charred steak. In mouth the juice is viscous with a black pepper flavor emerging amidst the black fruits, tar and dark cherry. The wine is very jammy. Richness carries through to a long finish over 1 minute since swallowing and I still get the black pepper and jam.

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  3/2/2021 - iamandyc Likes this wine: 94 Points

  My only bottle and that's a shame! This puppy is a really fine wine and had it had more time in the decanter probably would have garnered another couple of points. Another beautifully textured 2016. This is dark with black fruit and awesome powdery tannins. Long finish due to the complexity of the wine and the nice structure. Earth, dark chocolate, burnt tobacco, spice... Was opening up nicely by the last glass. Give it 3 hours or more to fully blossom.

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  7/15/2020 - RayT Likes this wine: 93 Points

  Purple in color with a meaty nose of blackberry, chargrill, pine, and a touch of pepper. On the palate blackberry, cassis and raspberry on the finish. The nose had a touch of heat on the PNP and a bit of alcohol when initially drinking. Most of that blew off after a couple of hours. This was a juicy, medium to full bodied wine, with a long finish.

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  11/30/2018 - csimm wrote:

  Wine Thief (2016 Purlieu) (Napa): A new wine from Purlieu. This little bugger seemed to be doing pretty well initially... A nice dark crimson hue, interesting earthy wild raspberry and strawberry fruit compote aromas on the nose, and an array of red-black fruit, earth, railroad tie, and spice on the palate.
  
  It displayed as understandably youthful, primary, and a little acidic on the initial pull, but as air permeated the wine in the glass, the fruit was allowed to show more. Additionally and unfortunately, more time and air exposure also disclosed an earthy funk note that intruded itself into the profile and never dissipated. It didn’t fully reach that rained-on-dog wearing sweaty socks covered in wet newspaper level, but it did pull the palate senses away from the core flavors and made for a distracting encounter.
  
  Call it flawed; call it brett; call it an off-bottle. But it was certainly incomplete and stifled by whatever goofiness had infiltrated this particular bottle. This wine seemed to have good bones overall, so hopefully this was just a one-off, because I’m thinking Cornas and Sugarloaf belong as separate terroirs.

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  11/30/2018 - Cristal2000 wrote:

  I believe this is a new wine from Purlieu. Sugarloaf is very southern Napa, so a cooler climate cab. My only previous experience with the vineyard is Bevan's Sugarloaf Cab Franc based wine. Definitely expected big things with the WA 96pt score.
  
  This wine has so much going for it, but I just couldn't get away from what I would call a good amount of Brett on the nose. At first I thought it was just a lot of funky oak, char, embers etc...but I think all of us agreed at the end that this was indeed Brett. I mean to be fair, Cayuse gets away with that all the time and really uses it as its signature, so it certainly won't turn everyone off, but it is a flaw.
  
  Otherwise, this is well concentrated black fruit, with lots of chocolate and tons of savory layers of flavor. It's spicy almost like a Syrah, with refined but very prominent tannins. It's super earthy driven, so expect it to be much different than anything you'll get from Northern Napa.

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