Dark and soft, this Syrah has an enormous depth of fruit. The cherry liqueur and pie filling, mocha, cola, plum and gingerbread flavors finish dry...

This is young, sharp, jammy wine but has a depth of fruit and a rich structure that make it awfully likeable. Blackberries, cherries, blueberries, cocoa, coffee, it all adds up to a palate sensation.

Full scaled aromas of pepper and dried blackberries introduce this fat and flavorful wine, and, if the flavors that follow do run low on fruit energy at the finish, they remain rich to the end. An ample streak of dry tannins washes across the latter palate, yet the wine's slight leaning to structural softness points the way to comparatively early drinking nonetheless.

Ruby-red. Aromas of dark berries, leather, meat and white pepper. Supple and spicy, with cola and rooty notes.

This wine's strawberry fruit is held in the nutmeat flavors of oak; it's brightened and sharpened by acidity even as it's smoothed by that oak.

...the 1999 Stature Merlot North Coast. While it revealed high acidity as well as tannin, structure, and ripeness, it was closed and monolithic the day I tasted it.

Round with a supple texture to black currant, earth, herb and black cherry flavors framed by modest tannin and toasty oak.

Well-proportioned, with enough soft, ripe currant and cherry fruit to fill in the holes; turns tannic and austere on the finish.

Well-balanced, with blackberry, toasty oak and plum flavors. Herbal tones mix with firm tannins on the finish.

Well-balanced, and with good concentration to its blackberry, toasty oak and plum flavors. Herbal tones integrate with firm tannins on the finish.

Chocolate and berry aromas vie for the spotlight. Soft, almost sweet in the mouth, with solid berry fruit and dried herbs. Finishes with a healthy dose of buttery, chocolatey oak …

Bright, deep red-ruby. Red berries, plum and smoky oak on the nose. Supple, ripe and harmonious, with good sweetness but modest flesh and depth of fruit. Initially light tannins turned a bit dry as the wine opened in the glass.

Full ruby red. Distinctly oak-accented aromas. Dry and well gripped on the medium-bodied palate with oak dominating the ripe, plummy black-fruit flavors.

Red berry, coffee and oak spice on the nose. Finishes with very fine, dusty tannins.

"Serves up an attractive core of ripe plum, cherry, and berry flavors with light toasty oak shadings; it loses its focus on the finish, when the flavors become more diffuse." (Also appeared 6/30/96).

Serves up a pretty array of ripe, supple cherry, plum and strawberry flavors with appealing spice notes. Ready now through 1998.

As you can imagine, the Jackson Family have enormous vineyard sources from which to get their Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Their 2014 Merlot Grand Reserve comes from Sonoma and is 95% Merlot and the rest Malbec and Petit Verdot, with a tiny dollop of Cabernet Sauvignon. It is aged mostly in French wood. The wine is soft and ripe, with mocha, roasted herbs, cocoa bean, and some chocolaty plum and cherry notes. The wine has good, rich fruit and is straightforward and attractive. Anticipated maturity: now-2026.

It should be easy to drink this sweetish Merlot with everything from a hamburger to a steak. It’s rich in cherry flavor, with lots of palate-stimulating spices.

The 2008 Vintner's Reserve Merlot (98% Merlot and the rest Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc aged 14 months in two-thirds French and one-third American oak) exhibits a dark plum color along with notes of cherry cola, raspberry, garrigue, loamy soil and spice box. This medium-bodied, juicy Merlot is somewhat monolithic, but it displays an appropriate varietal character. Drink it over the next 2-3 years. Kendall-Jackson enjoys a well-deserved reputation for over-delivering quality vis à vis price for its wines. Any offering from Kendall-Jackson bearing the Vintner's Reserve designation will offer much more quality than its humble price suggests.

Peppery, spicy, prune, tobacco, cherry jam, cedar bark, chocolate, black olive aromas. Round, dry, somewhat tart, light palate. Herbal, tobacco, cedar bark, cherry, resin, leather flavours with a prune note.

Its aromas of red cherries also suggest notes of loam and chocolate, and those enjoyable themes are repeated in comfortable flavors that seem likely to hold on for a year or two.

Black cherry and hints of briar highlight the aromas of this cassis-tinged wine, but the suggested tilt towards Cabernet Sauvignon is less evident in the wine's flavors than in its nose, and save for some finishing astringency, the mouth tracks like Merlot in character.