From the Cellar
Bringing Back Memories (British Columbia / Italy)
30 Nov 2014- Details
- Category: Uncorked Tonight
(September 24, 2014) ... Holding wine from a trip is a double edged sword, sure you can bring yourself back to the time you were there, but if its been to long the wine can deliver poor memories even while you're trying to remember the good ones.
Six years ago (can't believe it has been that long) my mother and I took a trip to BC wine country on Canada's west coast for her 70th birthday. We sip, spat and sampled some amazing BC wines and came back with 3 cases of their fermented grape juice (making us, at the time, law-breakers of Canada's assinine wine laws) ... Today I was visiting with my parents and brought along a couple of bottles that still exist from that trip. Starting off with an Antelope Ridge 2006 Cabernet Franc (Domaine Combret) the nose was very smoky and herbal while the palate proved to be very oaky with tobacco nuances, but it also lacked it's fruit and finished with some cigarette ash ... I took a wait-and-see approach with this wine, hoping it would come about, but after an hour there was little to no change ... except maybe for the worse. Too bad, at the time of purchase this was a real beauty.
My next cork to pop was the Sumac Ridge 2005 Black Sage Cabernet Sauvignon, this one fared a little better with a nose of anise, dried raspberry, vanilla and oak. The palate kicked things off with oaky notes before giving way to dried raspberry and earthy elements, then finishing with some gritty tannins. An hour later the mid-palate of the wine seemed to be smoothing out nicely across the mid-palate though it kept the tannins fairly aggressive on the finish.
Neither of these wines proved to be to my mother's liking, as she prefers something a little on the smoother side ... So I had also brought a backup Italian bottle of Frescobaldi 2008 Tenuta di Castiglioni. Now this was a wine that was peaking nicely: aromas of black cherry and plum with a nice smoky-toasty note backing it up. The palate was full of lush fruit and good acidity along with a pleasant minerality, and a hint at a chalky finish. There were even hints of some bitter cocoa on that finish. This one just kept getting better and better with each sip ... And by my estimation still has a good 3-4 years left, if not more.
Since the first bottle of Italian wine went down so well we opened another, this time mom pulled out a little something from her stash, an Umani Ronchi 2007 Jorio. If we thought the 08 Frescobaldi was good the Ronchi proved equal to the task of matching it. Nose was plummy and earthy with a touch of oak ... At the outset there seemed to be an underlay of corkiness in the aromas, but it did not seem present on the palate, so I chalked it up to barrel or earthy notes ... As the evening wore on corkiness never seemed to materialized more, and as seasoned wine drinkers know cork-taint does not improve with time, it gets more prominent, thankfully here it did not.
