Halcon 2018 Syrah “Alturas” Estate Mendocino 95 Points

The Alturas is a wonderful wine, offering up a youthful but superb bouquet of violets, cracked pepper, grilled meat and crunchy cassis. On the palate, the wine is medium-bodied, concentrated and tensile, with fine-grained tannins, a deep core of crunchy fruit and a long, sapid finish. While this is already delicious, it’s emphatically a young wine, and the real fireworks will begin when it has five years on the clock. Cropped at 1.25-tons per acre and fermented with 50% whole clusters, this lovely Syrah from Halcón wouldn’t be out of place in a flight of great Cornas. It’s also shockingly good value.

Jeb Dunnuck 95 Points: “The 2018 Syrah Alturas offers a more vivid, Côte-Rôtie-like style and has beautiful notes of black raspberries, spring flowers, peppered meat, and violets. More sappy underbrush and even a kiss of bacon fat emerge with time in the glass. and it’s medium-bodied, has a silky, elegant texture, wonderful mid-palate depth, and enough tannins to warrant a year or three of bottle age. Beautifully done, this complex, elegant Syrah is going to evolve for 10-15 years or more.”

Vinous 94 Points: “A stellar, alluring wine, the 2018 Syrah Halcón Vineyard captures the essence of this site in its combination of inky dark fruit and savory, perfumed explosiveness. Blueberry, sage, mint, lavender and spice all race out of the glass in a magical, deeply expressive Syrah that hits all the right notes. The 2018 is just magnificent!”