2016 Daou Mayote
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Tasting notes
Bright, youthful purple. A highly complex bouquet evokes ripe blue fruits, exotic spices, candied violet and olive, along with vanilla and smoky mineral notes that gain strength as the wine opens up. Stains the palate with deeply concentrated, spice-tinged black and blue fruit preserve, spicecake and floral pastille flavors that are given spine by a core of juicy acidity. Becomes livelier and sweeter with air and finishes impressively long and supple, with gently firming tannins coming up slowly. (22 months in new French oak barrels)
Critic scores
Average Score
Jeb Dunnuck
Josh Raynolds
More reviews and scores
The 2016 Mayote is a blend of 46% Syrah, 37% Cabernet Sauvignon and 17% Petit Verdot aged 22 months in 100% new French oak. Deep ruby-purple in color, the nose offers up so many lovely nuances! Vanilla bean, jamon di iberico, licorice, Indian spices, potpourri and cigar wrapper scents mingle over a core of blackberry and black cherry pie with mineral notions and exotic spices at the core. The medium to full-bodied palate gains amplitude in the mouth, with firm, wonderfully pixelated tannins, fantastic flavor layers and nearly unbelievable freshness, finishing very long, layered and nuanced. This is a stunner!
The 2016 Mayote is the Syrah inclusive wine in the lineup and is 46% Syrah, 37% Cabernet Sauvignon, and 17% Petit Verdot in 2016. Just bottled a week ago, it certainly wasn’t showing any worse for it and offers a fabulous bouquet of juicy dark fruits, peppery herbs, earth, and some background meatiness. This full-bodied, pure, seamless beauty has sweet tannin, no hard edges, and remarkable purity of fruit, all making for a fabulous bottle of wine that should keep for 8-10 years. From high up off Adelaida Road, the Daou brothers continue to make a massive lineup of stellar wines. The 2016s are incredibly strong across the board and make the most of this brilliant vintage. In 2017, they opted to wait until after the heatwaves and then do extensive sorting, and this paid off brilliantly and I suspect they’ve made the top Bordeaux blends in the vintage. As I’ve said in the past, these wine compete with the best of Napa Valley and are some of the leading Bordeaux blends from Paso Robles.