Deeply concentrated, it layers the palate with essences of dark cherries, oriental spice and cola nut. It remains expressive throughout with excellent delineation and inner mouth perfume. An ethereal marriage of sky and soil.

Price Php 3,400 per bottle

94 points! Wine Enthusiast

“The Poet’s Leap Riesling continues its string of outstanding vintages, once again exceptionally concentrated and complex.

The high-acid 2008 vintage adds extra juicy vibrancy to the fruit, giving the wine an impression of dryness and dense, layered fruit component. A mix of old vine and German clones, this is a superb effort.” - Editor’s Choice

Matt Kramer
Posted: June 1, 2010
Excerpt from WineSpectator.com

“Nearly all wines are better if decanted. Now, this is a truth that I have tested innumerable times over the decades with just about every wine type you can think of.

So why the qualifier “nearly”? Because I have yet to test it with sparkling wines. I’m no great fancier of bubbly, and therefore prefer to get it out of the way as quickly as possible in order to get to “real” wine. I do know Champagne fanciers who assert that decanting does, indeed, serve the cause of sparkling wine.

That caveat aside, I’m prepared to say that one of the truths of wine is that pretty much all wines, red or white, young or old, are better if decanted. Mind you, I’m not talking here about how long the wine should remain exposed to air in a decanter; that seems pretentious and overly prescriptive. Just pour the wine into the decanter, exposing it to some air in the process, and serve it when you like. I’ve yet to see a wine suffer for this, and I’ve seen an awful lot of wines be the better for it. Really, you can’t lose.

Most fine wines are at their best with 10 years of age. Like all truths, this is not an exactitude so much as it is reliably true for most wines most of the time. (When Voltaire famously said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” it was for just this sort of thing. You can’t let a demand for absolute perfection be the enemy of what’s generally good and true.)

You will almost never go wrong serving any wine with 10 years of age on it. This of course assumes that the wine has been well stored in a cool place. Without that, all bets are off. But if well cellared, I’m hard-pressed to think of a fine wine that isn’t either showing its best or at least approaching its best after a decade of aging from the date of the vintage.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t drink any fine wine until it has hit the 10-year mark? Of course not. Rather, this truth suggests that never more than today, when so many wines are well made, there’s no hurry. And that after 10 years of age in a cool spot, nearly all fine wines can give you the best of both worlds: a still-youthful fruitiness and the greater dimensionality of flavor that only age can offer.

You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. I mentioned this recently in a column about wines from Argentina. But it bears repeating, and expanding upon, if only because this particular truth has taken me a long time to recognize and accept.

No one disputes that it’s always a nice idea to visit where a wine comes from. But when I first became involved with wine I recoiled from the premise that I had to see the place in order to truly understand it. I felt, not unreasonably, that with enough tasting and reading and imagination, I could apprehend all that was worth knowing about, say, Volnay. I was wrong.

The key word, of course, is “understand.” It’s true that you can become expert, in the literal sense of that term, about a wine without ever having set foot on its originating site. At such a moment you are technically proficient, much like mastering a foreign language without ever actually going to its native land. It can be done.

Yet as anyone who has studied a foreign language can tell you, there’s no substitute for chatting up the locals. There’s nothing like hearing how it’s used, catching the subtle cadences and, above all, seeing how the language is inseparable from the culture.

So it is with wine. You can never understand a wine until you’ve seen where it’s grown. It’s why you can’t truly understand someone until you’ve met their family and visited where they were raised. It’s no different with wine-fine wine, anyway.”

(65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 27% Merlot, 4% Petite Verdot, 2% Malbec, 2% Cabernet Franc)

Ruby red with notes of campfire, toast and sweet vanilla. On the palate - wild strawberry, rhubarb, and sassafras. And the finish - 30 plus seconds with an impression of cherry pie.

Php 3,500.00

As we all look forward to 2010, we are delighted to offer you our latest releases primarily from Napa and we are pleased to announce the newcomers in our portfolio: CG Di Arie, Littorai Estate Wines & Winery, Morse Wines, Neal Family Vineyards, “Papillon” from Orin Swift Cellars and Philip Togni Vineyard. Also, we will never fail to mention our special allocation of the current vintages of Spottswoode Estate Vineyard & Winery, Staglin Family Vineyard and Blackbird Vineyards.

We ensure that these wines are shipped and stored under impeccable conditions to provide you maximum satisfaction.

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Each year, Wine Spectator editors survey the wines they’ve reviewed over the past 12 months and select the most exciting for our Top 100.

This annual list, which debuted in 1988, reflects significant trends, spotlights successful regions and recognizes outstanding producers. In 2009, they reviewed more than 17,000 new releases from around the world in blind tastings. More than 3,800 of these wines earned outstanding ratings (90 points or higher on our 100-point scale). They narrowed the list down based on four criteria: quality (represented by score); value (reflected by release price); availability (measured by case produced or imported); and an X-factor we call excitement. But no equation determines the final selections: These choices reflect our editors’ judgment and passion about the wines they’ve tasted.

Since 2009 was a year of economic retrenchment, they focused even more on value as we made our choices; the average price per bottle is $40, down from the past two years. Quality remains high, with an average score of 93 points, matching the previous three years, and 13 countries are represented. Please enjoy this list of exciting values, emerging stars and classic wines and that are WS’ Top 100 of 2009 leads you to more deeply explore the world of wine.

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While the D.R. Stephens Estate Moose Valley Vineyard tends to lead the pack with Cabernet intensity, our DRII Cabernet is designed to showcase approachability and bright fruit in a more gregarious structure. The aromas show a lovely combination of bright cherry and dark raspberry fruit complexing with bayberry and cedary notes.

Silky and round at entry, the palate is completely approachable now, giving this wine a lovely presence even at the time of release. The finish shows the same level of flavor intensity as the DRSE, but with a slightly lighter and more fruit-forward expression.

The wine was bottled in mid-July 2007, without fining or filtration. To preserve the fruit intensity, only 60% new French Oak was used on this wine.

Php 3,300.00

Each year, Wine Spectator editors rate new vintages from 30-plus regions around the world and provide updates on older vintages based on tastings and analyses of as many as hundreds of wines from each region.

Each vintage rating consists of three components: The score indicates the general quality of the wines; the description sums up the growing season and the wines’ character; the drink recommendation suggests when the wines will be at their best.

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The heady perfume of sour-cherry spiciness mixed with an under-current of herbal intrigue. The sunny but cool and breezy days of this northern coastal valley offer great acidity with a fine backbone of ripe tannins that together provide a structural core balancing the concentrated black cherry mid-palate. A delicious and definite keeper!

Php 2,350.00