2005 Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve is Still #1 in My Book

This month the Roanoke Fine Wine Society sat down to taste 10 of Wine Spectators Top 100 wines of 2009.

There were a lot of great wines on the table including the group favorite, a 2007 Two Hands Bella’s Garden Shiraz, but the wine that most impressed me was the 2005 Columbia Crest Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve.

On the nose it was yeasty with lots of black cherry and spice. On the palate it offered up coffee, leather, vanilla and charred oak and some gripping tannins that carried though to a 30 + second finish. It’s a monster of a wine sure to have a few more good years.

A whopping 5,000 cases of this wine were offered up for sale but the supply is quickly dwindling. At release a bottle of this juice could be had for around $27.00. Now you’re lucky to find it on-line for under $90.

How’s that for wine appreciation?

D’Arenberg’s The Laughing Magpie: Love at First Sip

We first tasted this wine in 2004 and we were instantly smitten. I don’t recall the vintage (it was likely a 2002 or 2003) but I recall my surprise and delight. I had never before tasted a Shiraz blended with a splash of Viognier. Adding this fragrant and full-body white grape to a deep-colored, muscular and spicy Shiraz seemed to me, at the time, a stroke of genius. It still does many years later as we pulled a 2004 out of the cellar.

The 2004 still had the same deep purple color, the same herbal, floral nose I recalled from the earlier vintage. It had the same velvet mouthfeel which I credited to the Viognier which, even in a small dose at 6 percent, took the edge off of a tannic in-your-face McLaren Vale Shiraz. The dark fruits from the Shiraz remained firmly in control on the palate and carried on with spice and tea-like tannins on the finish. It proved to be a great pairing with the chicken curry I had prepared that night.

We were so impressed with 2004 we ordered a bottle of the 2006 at a Valentine’s dinner with our neighbors a few nights later. Again, that impressive deep purple color, same round velvety mouthfeel but this time we tasted more dark chocolate and cherry than in the 2004 which seemed perfect for the occasion as we polished off a second bottle with the pot du crème au chocolate dessert.

I have often wondered how this Australian blend came to be. At first I suspected it might have been a marriage of convenience between a sweet and fragrant young vine Viognier and a curmudgeonly old vine Shiraz. But it turns out this wine was not a hasty blend, but rather a thoughtful and deliberate co-fermentation process that suggests an arranged marriage. No judgment here, as they seem happy together in a marriage that seems to have held up over many good years.

A Taste of Chinese Wine

I’ve had two opportunities to taste wine made in China. The first occasion was a blind tasting where we were asked to guess the country of origin of eight wines. I was the only member of the Roanoke Fine Wine Society to identify the Chinese wine correctly, not because I actually thought it was Chinese wine but because I thought it was cooked. I believe my exact words were “it tastes like it came on a slow boat from China.” Ding, Ding!

My most recent occasion was a Thanksgiving dinner where the host offered up a wine from China which had been given to him by friend who was a frequent traveler there. My husband Robert also travels to China for business but he has never been temped to bring back Chinese wine. Having sampled more than a few, he prefers to stick to Chinese beer and green tea.

I understand why after this last taste of Zixuan Wine. I actually tasted this wine on two separate days. The first sip was on the day of the Thanksgiving dinner when I rescued the bottle from being dumped by the host after his first sip. Give it a day or two, I thought, maybe it’s just bottle shock. My notes below are from the later tasting but I must say the wine hadn’t changed much with some air.

Nose: Tar and plum, medicinal and hot--not enough to singe the nose hairs but pretty close.

Palate: Lot’s of grainy tannin, chalk, blackberry. And something I remember from my youth in Alberta called chokecherry, a wild berry also known as prunus virginiana, that has a toxic pit but once removed the remaining berry can be eaten and used to make wine, if you dare. My dad actually made wine out of these berries but that experiment proved unsuccessful and we left a case of it for the new owners when we moved out of our house in Calgary.

Finish: Very long, not entirely unpleasant but with lots of new oak, some metallic components, and a dry, chalky feel on the tongue that lingered for over a minute.

I have no idea what grape this wine was made from (I would guess Cabernet Sauvignon) or what it cost to buy and I could not find this label on the company website, but I don’t think I would enjoy this wine at any price.

Much like my father’s chokecherry wine, some wines are best left behind.

From the Cellars and Vineyards of Napa and Sonoma (Part 2)

On our second day in Napa we had made two appointments for tastings—one for Reynolds Family and one for Del Dotto.

Reynolds Family Winery is owned by Steve and Suzie Reynolds who gave up their dental practice to fully embrace the challenge of turning a chicken ranch into an award-winning winery. Their hard work and determination shows in their wines, one of which is aptly named Persistence.

As we sat outside at one of the tables overlooking their duck pond, we tasted five of their wines. I particularly enjoyed the’07 Napa Chardonnay which was long and silky on the palate with notes of citrus, melon, roasted pineapple, and vanilla. We also enjoyed the ’05 Estate cabernet, and the ’05 Persistence, a blend of Cabernet, Cabernet Franc, Syrah, Petite Verdot, and Merlot.

Both of these reds were very well-balanced, with dark fruit, chocolate, spice, and mineral components and enough tannins to see you through to a long finish. We bought a few bottles to take back with us to the rented house in Calistoga and ended drinking one right there, as we nibbled on the bread and cheese we had brought along with us.

When we finished our picnic lunch we realized we had enough time before our next appointment to do a quick tasting at Turnbull. Turnbull has been a favorite of ours ever since we happened upon one of their Napa Valley cabernet and instantly fell in love. In 2008, we just couldn’t get enough of their ’05 Napa Valley Cabernet and went on a search for every last bottle in stock in Roanoke, Virginia, our home town. Even though the ’05 cab was their largest production to date, when we arrived in the tasting room in October 2009 they only had five cases left of this wine in stock.

Part of the reason for the success of Turnbull wines is that despite producing some very quality wines they have managed to keep prices down to a reasonable level for Napa. All wines are made from grapes grown on Turnbull-owned properties and at present they have 200 planted acres of vines. I was surprised to find some Tempranillo along with the Merlot and Sangiovese in their ’07 Old Bull Red. Later I would find that Vincent Arroyo, a well-known Napa grower and winemaker is also growing Tempranillo, but it’s not something you see everyday in Napa. Old Bull a well-priced juicy, crowd-pleasing kind of wine that would be a very welcome guest at your next Super Bowl party. The Barbera, Cabernet, and Cabernet Franc in this wine give it enough testosterone to pair with a spicy chili or chicken wings.

Up until now Robert and I had been sharing tastings but when we left Turnbull and arrived a Del Dotto, we decided to have our own glass thank you very much. Robert and I had visited this tasting room the year before and we had tasted enough Del Dotto wine to know that we didn’t want to be wrestling each other for the last sip in the glass.

Del Dotto is a family-owned winery with properties in both Napa and Sonoma. David Del Dotto is the son of Dominic Del Dotto a native of Lucca in Tuscany and he credits Dominic for instilling in him an appreciation for good red wine.

David and his wife Yolanda started out with a property on Zinfandel Lane in St. Helena and initially sold most of their grape off to other winemakers but eventually decided to keep the good stuff for themselves and make the best wine they could make. Gary Galleron consulted at the beginning and since 1997 Nils Venge has been the consulting winemaker.

The Del Dotto family had recently opened a stunning Venetian-style tasting room in St Helena. However, since our family had never been to Napa before we opted to go to the Del Dotto historic winery location in Napa where we could get barrel tastings in their 120 year old wine cave, the second oldest wine cave in Napa. We were fortunate to get the facility manager as our tour guide and he proceeded to fill our glasses with ten or so wines thieved from the barrel. This was more wine than we could swallow, literally, but he encouraged us to splash the sides of the wine cave with any leftover wine in our glass.

David Del Dotto has been experimenting with various cooperages for years and during the cave tour your are invited to sample the same juice from two different barrels—one French oak, one American oak—and taste for yourself how barrels made of different oak impart vastly different characteristics to a wine. We were asked to vote for our favorite and in our tour group of eleven the votes were pretty well evenly split. This just shows that there is no universally superior oak—it’s just a matter of taste and what you want the oak to bring to the wine.

I was particularly enamored with the '08 Del Dotto Cinghiale Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. Our barrel taste so impressed us that we bought futures. Of course, the wine will be a different wine once it makes it into the bottle but I was blown away by the complexity and elegance of this Pinot Noir even at this young stage in its’ life.

From the Cellars and Vineyards of Napa and Sonoma (Part 1)

I invited family members from Canada and Scotland to join Robert and me in Napa Valley, California for five days. None of my family members had been to California wine country before so I wanted to give them a taste of wines that generally do not escape our borders.

Our first stop was Saddleback Cellars, the proprietor of which is Nils Venge, one of California’s hottest consulting winemakers. Nils has been making wine under his own label and for others for a very long time. He’s an unpretentious kind of guy who likes nothing more than kicking back with a well-crafted wine and some good country music blaring from the speakers, but he takes wine-making very seriously and consistently creates some of the best value wines in what is typically a very pricey neighborhood, the Oakville floor.

The tendency on the floor is focus on the big reds, the high-priced cabs this part of Napa is so famous for. Nils does offer the best of Napa fruit in his cabs, merlots, and zinfandels but he is equally attentive to the whites in his Saddleback Cellars range, and we tasted a very lovely ’07 Viognier and very impressive ’07 Napa Chardonnay. Nils also does a nice, crisp Pinot Blanc, offering aromatics of green apple, melon, and honeysuckle, which we have tasted and enjoyed over multiple vintages and consider to be one of our favorite hot weather whites.

We were tempted to linger at the picnic tables bordering the edge of the vines but we had another appointment down the road at Gargiulo Vineyards. Jeff Gargiulo and his team have been making estate wines in Oakville since 2000 with fruit from two properties—the Money Road ranch and 575 OVX. Kristof Anderson joined as winemaker in 2003 and uses gravity-fed techniques to gently coerce the best flavors and aromas from the grape. We tasted the ’06 Aprile Sangiovese/cab blend, Money Road Cabernet, and the 575 OVX G Major Seven Study, a Bordeaux-style blend which was my favorite of the bunch with bramble, blackberry, cassis, and vanilla on the nose and a smooth, well-balanced finish.

It was obvious this was going to be a music-themed week when Grammy winning artist/songwriter Billy Dean passed by the tasting room on his way to the recording studio (which sits among the vines) and our hosts asked him if would play us a song. He set down his glass of chardonnay, grabbed a guitar from Jeff Gargiulo’s displayed collection, sat down, and played his song “ The Penny” much to the delight of all.

Can you think of a better way to start a week in Napa and Sonoma?

Check back next week for Part 2 of our adventures in Napa and Sonoma.

Chateau Montelena Estate Cab '93 and '98

Robert and I have been fans of Chateau Montelena Estate cabs since our first trip to Napa back in '96. It's quite possible we bought the '93 back then and carried it home with us to our newly- built cellar.

Unfortunately when we opened the '93 for dinner with another couple (also fans of ch. Montelena cab) the first look and sniff told us we had waited to long to enjoy what we clearly fell in love with back in '96. The rim was clear and the wine looked and smelled oxidized. Our palates confirmed it--this former beauty was past her prime. Too bad.

Luckily we also had the '98 on hand and it was just what we expected--round, layered, with heady, lovely nose so characteristic of this cab.

But one bottle was not enough for dinner so we finished with a '05 Turnbull Estate cab which nicely contrasted newer Napa fruit with old and was a perfect pairing for upside-down pear and walnut cake and strawberries with whipped cream. Yummy!