2018 - Fleurie Clos de la Roilette Cuvee Tardive, Coudert

Youthful purple. A complex, highly perfumed bouquet evokes ripe red/blue fruits, baking spices and potpourri, with hints of blood orange and savory herbs emerging with aeration. Juicy, densely packed mulberry and boysenberry flavors show excellent clarity and powerful back-end thrust becoming sweeter with air. Shows serious power and sexy, floral lift on the impressively persistent finish, which is supported by slowly building, youthfully gripping tannins.

Coudert's brilliant 2018 Fleurie Cuvée Tardive offers up a deep and incipiently complex bouquet featuring raspberries, mulberries, rose petals, violets and cracked black pepper. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, deep and layered, with an abundance of rich and powdery structuring tannins, ripe but lively acids and a long, lingering finish. While this is built for the long haul—its name alluding to the aging potential of this old-vine cuvée, not to a later harvest—its enveloping profile and perfectly mature phenolics will make it unusually approachable in its youth.