2016 Carter Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Carter
Estimated value
Buying options
Tasting notes
The 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon Carter Carter is a beauty and is a mix of all the single vineyard releases. Offering a ripe, powerful style, with smoking notes of chocolaty dark fruits, camphor, licorice, and spice, it hits the palate with a full-bodied, layered, opulent style. Showing the purity and elegance of the 2016 vintage as well as serious oomph and decadence, it's a beautiful wine that's certainly in the same ballpark as the single vineyard releases.
Critic scores
Jeb Dunnuck
Antonio Galloni, Vinous
More reviews and scores
The 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon Carter is a blend of the best barrels in the cellar. Powerful and voluptuous in the glass, with tons of concentration, but no sense of heaviness. Mocha, espresso, cherry preserves, licorice, spice and mint build into the layered, racy finish. The 2016 lives up to its billing as the top wine in the range.
Very deep purple-black in color, the 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon Carter begins just a little closed and youthfully reticent before revealing loads of black fruit and earth-inspired notes, including baked black cherries, cassis, blackberry pie and tilled soil with hints of fungi, underbrush, scorched earth and mossy bark. Full-bodied and densely packed with black fruit and earth layers, it has a firm backbone of grainy tannins and a lively line, finishing long and mineral laced. This needs at least 5-7 years and then should drink for the next 30+ years.