Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.5

So good. Freakish in the right way. Nose of herbs, keuper, minerals and more. A bit closed but it’s also a bit cold. Palate is just killing it. Juicy and clean with awesome texture and density. Sapid and almost tannic on the finish. So much going on. Insane inner mouth aromas. Really elegant. Unreal length. Just a rock star. Will be back once nose opens up. Unreal complexity and finish. Gorgeous. Nose is wide open now after around 10 minutes. Stunning. Lanolin, herbs and lemon lime. Expansive and so much depth. So good. — 2 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.5

White Cap. Rocking bottle of Domprobst. One of my favorite sites. Sweet or dry. Nose is all mineral powder, some mineral chunks, lime zest, green apple skins, some other deep mineral scents and scant white flowers. Palate is full bodied and dense but also silky and impossibly dry yet ripe. What a tightrope. Juicy and barely sweet but really just ripe and mineral. Sweet tart vibes. So good. Let’s see what air does. — 8 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.9

The 2022 red Burgundies were divine from barrel, just absurdly promising, all perfume and shape and perfectly judged pleasure. Then they arrived in bottle and went through that horrible awkward phase, total puberty mustache energy, all elbows and uncertainty, like the wines had temporarily forgotten where their limbs were. And now? My God. The hedonism is completely out of control. This 2022 Pierre Brisset Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Aux Thorey is a 9.9 and the only reason it is not a 10 is because it is still heading upward. The pleasure is already enormous, but you can feel more authority, more integration, more depth still on the way. So much energy on day 2. Dense and chewy. Awesome. — 11 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.6

Hadn’t tasted Audoin in many, many years, so I was genuinely curious to come back to him. This absolutely blew my mind. Incredible fruit purity, lifted and precise without getting precious, and probably the best Fixin I’ve ever had. One of those bottles that makes you sit up a little straighter and recalibrate the whole appellation. — 11 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.6

Just a brilliant, cerebral Riesling. Nose has some funk, lemon, lime, slate, lemon pith, lemon flesh and juicy lime. So piercingly mineral. The palate is just stunning. So gorgeous and pure. Really young out of the gates. Like biting into a lemon. Awesome acidity and freshness but very very young and closed. Air does wonders here. Wonderful but man does this need air. Now, 24 hours later we have gotten air. Boy is this stunning. The nose finally had that slate/porphyry minerality in spades. Dense and elegant with a fiercely mineral finish. Chewy. Structure for days! — 2 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

10

This was perfection. Full stop. Ten points, 100, A plus, whatever scale you want to drag into the room, it all collapses under the same truth: it does not get better than this. The 2016 Ar.Pe.Pe. Sassella Rocce Rosse Riserva was so achingly beautiful, so complete, so internally right, that halfway through I stopped even trying to “evaluate” it and just gave in. What makes it unbearable, in the best way, is how nothing sticks out and yet everything glows. The wine has lift, detail, soul, delicacy, authority, all of it moving at once, all of it perfectly proportioned. It just stands there in complete command of itself, and the longer it sits in the glass the more it seems to reveal that perfection and grace are not opposites. They are partners. Words really do start to fail with a wine like this, because the whole point of the experience is that it reaches past language. — 11 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.8

I’m starting to get a little nervous about 2019 red Burgundy. The vintage was so dazzling young that people, understandably, got seduced. It reminded me of 2005 in that way, huge early authority, massive promise, the kind of wines that make you think you are looking at immortality. But now I’m seeing the same thing I eventually saw there: a slightly roasty evolution and a pace of maturation that feels faster than I’m comfortable with. This 2019 Pierre Brisset Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru Aux Thorey is still gorgeous, a 9.7 wine, but it also reinforces the point. If I had real depth in 2019s, I would not be waiting around for some imaginary perfect plateau. I’d start drinking. This really got younger and more dense overnight and is drinking way better. 9.7 to 9.8. — 11 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.6

Earthy, deep cherry fruits on the nose and just a wallop or sweet, wet Volnay earth. Palate is so seductive and gorgeous. It has that 22 opulence but also the Garaudet earthy grit. Unreal, sweet and velvety tannins. Really brilliant. Let’s see what air does. I can only assume it will finesse out like in barrel. Wow did this need air! Stunning aromas that are classic Volnay. Haunting with such lift. Stunning fruit on the palate and a deep, but grapey young quality. 9.5 to 9.6. — 5 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.7

Outrageous. Unreal sweet fruit and creamy tannins on the palate. So elegant and unreal inner mouth aromas. Lush and energetic and gushing with black cherry fruit and sweet tart cherry fruit. Explosive and so pure. Wow. Such fine tannins. — 8 days ago

Lyle Fass

Founder Fass Selections

9.1

Day two with the 2016 Brovia Barolo Villero, and this was frustrating in exactly the way certain 2016s can be frustrating. Brovia Villero, for me, is one of the great wines of Langhe. The material here was obvious. The site nobility was obvious. But at 14.5%, this bottle leaned too far into the heat side of the vintage for my taste. That is the 2016 crapshoot in a nutshell. The producers who mastered the year made some of the greatest wines I have ever tasted. The producers who let the vintage lead made wines that feel more dominated by the year than by the site. This landed in the second camp. Beautiful raw material, absolutely, but the heat kept stepping in front of the vineyard. And the cruel part is that maybe you do not get that level of material without the heat. So there is no clean complaint here. Just a tradeoff I felt in every glass. — 11 days ago