| Score: |
95 AG.
"The 2015 Pinot Noir Savoy Vineyard is fabulous. Highly nuanced with tremendous persistence, the 2015 is super-expressive today. Floral aromatics and bright, chiseled fruit find support from beams of tannin that extend the mid-palate and finish nicely. Hints of blood orange, rose petal and white pepper add brightness. What a gorgeous, supremely polished wine this is. My annual visit with Ted Lemon was one of the highlights of the ten days I spent in Sonoma earlier this year. The range of single-vineyard Pinots and Chardonnays are essays into the great terroirs of the Sonoma Coast and Anderson Valley. The 2016 Pinots are stunning for their aromatic depth and crystalline precision, while the 2015s, from a much richer vintage, are quite different in style, but every bit as compelling. Readers will find two superb back to back vintages in the Littorai 2016 and 2015 Pinots. The Chardonnays are a bit more difficult to grasp. Some of the 2016s had been racked into tank a few days before my visit, while the 2015s appear to be still in a state of bottle shock. None of that should be a huge issue over time. Still, I give a slight nod to Pinot over Chardonnay for consistency across both vintages. Ted Lemon describes 2016 as a year with relatively normal flowering and even maturation. Harvest took place over five full weeks. In 2015, on the other hand, protracted flowering led to uneven levels of ripeness in the field, which, in turn, made picking decisions challenging. All the fruit came in during a very compact period of just 20 days." Antonio Galloni, Vinous.com, Jan 2018 |