2016 Domaine René Rostaing Côte-Rôtie La Landonne
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Tasting notes
Dark purple. A deeply perfumed bouquet evokes ripe dark berries, cherry liqueur, incense and potpourri, while olive and exotic spice nuances build in the glass. Intense, alluringly sweet black and blue fruit, spicecake and violet pastille flavors show sharp delineation and a spine of juicy acidity. Closes extremely long and precise, displaying a smoky, intensifying mineral quality and youthfully gripping tannins that build steadily.
Critic scores
Joe Czerwinski, Wine Advocate
Jeff Leve, The Wine Cellar Insider
More reviews and scores
The 2016 Côte Rôtie La Landonne is another brilliant wine that has textbook La Landonne notes of powerful, ripe black fruits, smoked meats, peppery herbs, tobacco, and beef blood. Full-bodied, beautifully concentrated, layered, and structured, it has the elegant, finesse style of the vintage front and center, yet is still a powerful, masculine, structured wine (which is this site). Give bottles 4-5 years of bottle age and it will cruise for two decades. I loved the 2016s from barrel from the young Pierre Rostaing and they didn’t disappoint from bottle. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find bottles of the Côte Brune and la Viallière (they didn’t show the wines at the domaine and I purchased bottles locally) but I’ve no doubt they’re brilliant wines as well. I suspect the 2017s will eclipse the 2016s.
Subtle notes of baking spices frame hints of tea, olives and raspberries on the nose of the 2016 Cote Rotie la Landonne. A paragon of elegance, it's medium to full-bodied, but silky from start to lingering finish. It's a wine that's pretty much guaranteed to make even the steeliest curmudgeon smile, as it's so bright, ephemeral and luscious. It's not the rich, ripe wine the 2015 is, but it's suave, complex and long.