With black tea leaf and brioche, Ulysses 2017 delivers dense layers of deep cherry, balsamic, peat, forest berries and fresh walnut, woven through a finely grained texture, and a lingering warm cacao powder finish.
96 James Suckling Extremely aromatic with crushed berries, currants, flowers and hints of uncured tobacco leaf. Carnations. Medium to full body and extremely fine tannins that are firm and polished. Vertical tannins draw you down. Some blanched-walnut character to the blue fruit. Fresh and clean at the finish. Release in spring 2020. So beautiful to drink now.
95 Wine Spectator This is packed with the ripe, vivid fruit of the vintage, sporting intense cassis, raspberry and blackberry flavors allied to prodigious structure in the form of licorice root and roasted apple wood notes. Rippling with muscle through the finish, but without being domineering, showing focus and detail. Like a Richard Serra, this is seemingly immense at first glance, but steadily pulls you in with its details. Best from 2022 through 2038.
91 Wine & Spirits Now the Oakville brother to Christian Moueix’s Dominus Estate in Yountville, Ulysses grows on a parallel benchland site up-valley, though the dry-farmed vines in Oakville do not share the almost imperceptible Yountville slope. The soil is deep, gravelly clay loam, the vines yielding a wine that’s firm, lean and fragrant. In 2017, the energy of the wine is at the service of its simple flavors, youthfully black in its grape-skin tannins, needing bottle age to grow more expressive.
