Donati Late Harvest Cabernet Franc 4-Pack
$44.99 $89.00 49% off List Price
2009 Late Harvest Cabernet Franc, Central Coast, Paicines, 375ml
CT link above
A punny Brian Eno reference? Awwww Woot you know me too well.
Perhaps some small bottles are proper to balance the SH behemoth I’m considering.
LH Cab Franc? Tell me more!!
Interesting. . .
Indeed…
Went for it despite no reviews to be found anywhere. Haven’t been able to get enough Cab Franc recently… excited to try a different treatment for it.
I’ve never seen anything like this… anyone out there ever had a taste of this, or even something similar?
Oh rats, no rats?
1.69% RS on a later harvest seems very low. Was this grown with the intention of being a late harvest or did the grapes just ripen too fast?
ping javadrinker for his thoughts from a couple years ago…
Then again, if his memory is no better than mine seems to be, not much additional help.
Java, check-in. How is this?
Looks like the AVA is about 10 miles south west of Paso Robles… I’m tempted to take a flyer on this one simply because of it’s uniqueness (and I do like desert wines) but would definitely be more likely to pull the trigger with some more info/tasting notes…
Most of the cab franc I’ve experienced (Chinon) has been less fruit driven, and more earthy… so I’m really curious how this would translate into a desert wine. I’m also not very familiar with the terroir in this region…
Hey Woot – Where do you get your prices? This bottle is $18 making the four bottles worth $72.
Almost certainly that $89 retail includes shipping from the winery, a rough average USA price. If you’re in CA it’ll be slightly less and if you’re in NY it’ll be a touch more. They used to put the breakdown on the specs page…I wonder where that went.
The magic of the interwebz is that if you hover your mouse over the words “list price”, answers are provided to you…
I’m guessing that with “shipping included” they got rid of the breakout. I agree it could have stayed with the woot shipping price removed for a simple comparison.
It was always our intention to produce a late harvest wine with this block of Cab Franc, however, RS was kept to a minimum so as not to take away from the aromatics that Cab Franc provides.
The fruit for this wine was sourced off of our estate vineyard in the Paicines AVA (say it with me everyone: “Pie - See - Ness”), it is actually located closer to the Monterey Bay, in San Benito County.
Here is a link to a great map of the region and it’s relation to other notable Central Coast AVA’s
Okay, the gorilla has entered the room (at least, I think that this avatar is a gorilla…)
Thanks to Woot for having us back for this Sweet Deal (pun intended).
We’ll be checking in periodically throughout the day to answer questions and throw interesting tidbits of information at you, like this one: DYK that the Paicines AVA was established on September 15th, 1982, making it the 9th oldest AVA in the state of California.
Cheers!
The Team at Donati Family Vineyard
I haven’t had a Late Harvest Cabernet Franc but I’ve had Cab Franc Ice Wine and it was delicious although it also had probably 10x the RS that this has, so apples/oranges. Despite being Late Harvest, this does not profile as a dessert wine (although it appears to be packaged, priced and marketed as a dessert wine). 1.69% RS would generally be categorized as “off-dry”.
EDIT: I’d be interested to know what the pH is for this wine. If fairly high, that might bring out more sweetness in the flavor profile as there would be less acid to balance the RS.