A beautiful wine with dense smoke and incense aromas. It’s lushly textured with deep soft tannins and flavors that pool into creme de cassis and ocean air. The finish is long with saturated fruit and asian spices.
What doomed this great wine to the vino dustbin is twofold. The first is price. Only a minuscule amount of Chilean wine sells above the $15 line. A sad truth, but that is the wine market in 2016. To prove the point, Lagar de Bezana offers a Cabernet Sauvignon, which is quite popular across the USA; It is priced at $14, on average.
The second issue is the ever-growing cost of storing the wine. The 2012 and 2013 vintages also got amazing scores from the wine critics, and those vintages are already in the warehouse. The 2014 vintage is on its way. The importer ( California’s Vino Del Sol) was under pressure to sell off in 2011. Company president Matt Hedges decided to liquidate the remaining inventory, about 250 cases, and sell at a loss to the PLCB. The deal probably lost his company $5k, but the likelihood of making a profit on the wine was dwindling, and the hard costs remained.
This is a common story with Chairman’s Selections wines, but not the only story. Sometimes it’s because the wine hails from a bad vintage, or sometimes it’s from a bankrupt winery. Sometimes it’s because the wine is godawful.
Bottom line: buy this wine. It’s awesome.