Happy New Year, friends! I hope you rang in 2019 with a good bottle of bubbly or two!
With New Year’s Resolutions on the mind, I’m always a little nostalgic as I reminisce on goals from past years and think of new ones. This entire blog was a New Year’s Resolution just a couple of years ago! My goal was to find a creative way to showcase my love for all things food, drink and travel. And here we are!
While I have some personal goals for the year to come, I wanted to create a blog-specific resolution as well. So, I’ve decided to create a weekly post called “Sip of the Week”. Each Wednesday I will publish a blog post featuring some sort of new sip. It may be wine, beer, a cocktail, or other distilled beverage. My goal is to showcase lesser-known brands, local breweries, wineries, or distilleries, and new cocktail recipes for all of you readers!
What better way to start than with this bottle of Troon Vineyard 2016 Estate Tannat?!
Our New Year’s Day dinner called for a special sip to accompany it, so I decanted this bottle of Tannat for the occasion. You may remember my post about Troon’s 2016 Cuvée Pyrénées, which was an outstanding bottle of wine. While this Tannat was very different than Cuvée Pyrénées, it was subtly balanced, surprisingly smooth, and pure quality in a bottle.
If you decide to try the Troon 2016 Tannat for yourself, here’s what you can expect:
This Tannat featured herbal, earthy flavor profiles, with an aroma filled with spices and fruit. This wine was all about subtleties…It took an evening of smelling and tasting the wine to really pinpoint some of its more nuanced flavors.
Tannats are characteristically tannic wines (meaning dry and astringent to taste…you can feel tannins on your teeth and tongue after sipping a tannic wine). Troon’s 2016 Tannat had a smooth mouthfeel on the finish to help balance the tannins. Decanting the wine for an hour helped to soften some of the tannins in the wine, too.
Troon’s 2016 Tannat is aged 18 months in mature oak, has 14% ABV (leading to some beautiful “legs” in the wineglass) and retails for $40.00 per bottle. For those interested in the finer details of the wine: TA 5.77, 3.59 pH, 210 cases produced.
Beyond the Bottle
Perhaps my favorite part of Troon wines is how they are produced: biodynamically, sustainably, and without additives. Tasting Troon’s 2016 Tannat tells a story of the Applegate Valley: higher altitudes, granite soil, a mild Southern Oregon climate, and a flavor profile crafted in the vineyard and preserved in the fermenter. Once again, Troon has created a natural wine of pure quality!
If I were to have another bottle of 2016 Estate Tannat, I would consider aging it for a few years before opening. My guess is that the subtleties of the wine’s flavors and aromas would gain some confidence in the cellar and provide a more complex flavor profile a few years down the line. I may just have to find a way to get my hands on another bottle! And a cellar, for that matter.
So, there you have it: the first edition of Sips N Tips 2019 Sip of the Week!
If you’re interested in learning more about Troon, click here to check out their website, or follow them on Facebook or Instagram.
Have a sip you think I should feature for a future Sip of the Week? Let me know in the comments below!
See you next Wednesday for another Sip of the Week!
Disclaimer: Troon Vineyard provided this bottle of 2016 Tannat in exchange for an honest review of the product. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
