Vérité
La Joie
Sonoma County
2015

The producer

Vérité was founded in the 1990s by Jess Jackson, founder of Jackson Family Wines and is inspired by the great classified growths of Bordeaux. Pierre Seillan has been winemaker at Vérité since 1998, and today his daughter Helene is assisting him.

Vérité produces three wines – La Muse, La Joie, and Le Desir – from over 50 micro- cru vineyards in the Sonoma County sub regions of Bennett Valley, Alexander Valley, Chalk Hill and Knights Valley.

Each of the three cuvees represents an expression of the diversity of Sonoma County. La Muse is Merlot-based blend and characterised by elegance and finesse. La Joie is primarily Cabernet Sauvignon and is powerful and bold in style. and finally Le Desir is a Cabernet Franc, and characterised by nuance and depth.

The wine

La Joie is comprised of around 70% Cabernet Sauvignon with the remainder Merlot and Cabernet Franc, and is produced from fruit grown along the steep volcanic hillsides of the Mayacamas Mountains. It is concentrated, powerful and bold, with impressive structure and complexity. La Joie is inspired by the richness and depth of top Bordeaux commune, Pauillac.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.