Shafer Napa Valley Merlot 2006
Shafer
This release is marked by its perfumy aromas of dark fruit that push out of the glass. The wine itself fills the mouth with opulent flavors of red and black bramble fruit,licorice, spice, pepper, strawberry and plum. It’s a wine that pairs so well with food, it makes us hungry just tasting it.
Flatter Merlot’s fruit by adding a similar element of fruit to poultry, pork and meat dishes (duck breast with dried Cherry-Merlot sauce, roast chicken with cranberry-wild rice stuffing). Carmelized onions,roasted garlic and mushrooms arepleasant companions.
Wine Enthusiast
Easily Shafer’s greatest Merlot ever. Certainly its richest, with fabulously concentrated blackberry, cherry, licorice, chocolate and cinnamon spice flavors. All this is wrapped into extraordinarily sweet, refined tannins. Addictively drinkable, but not a long ager. Best now and through 2012.
Score: 95.
—Steve Heimoff,
March
01,
2009.
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