Belated first post of 2005. So I've spent most of this month doing penance for the last several weeks of 2004. Lots of great wine experiences during the holidays -- including the Reynolds Family Winery Cabernet Sauvignon that Terri brought to the potluck Christmas Day.
     My favorite wine experience in December, though, was the impromptu tasting at the house on my birthday. G. and I lured a bunch of people over by promising to crack out the good stuff. It started back at the office party that afternoon with the 2002 Turley California Juvenile Zinfandel, which I remember liking a lot, though maybe not as much as previous releases of the same wine. In any case, the Turley was just a memory by the time everybody met back at my place, so it seemed safe to start in on the Pinot Noirs.
     The 2002 Reynolds Family Winery Carneros Pinot Noir, which Steph and I bought at the winery this past fall, did not disappoint. It was bold and smooth and dreamy, though right now it's hard to remember the specifics. (I wrote down some tasting notes, which seem to have vanished.)
     What I do remember, though, was that the next wine -- the 2001 Acacia Estate Vineyard Pinot Noir was something of a letdown. Steph, Delia and I had a bottle of this same wine at Lulu's with Tim and Brenda in the fall of 2003. And at the time, we all loved it.
     But at the birthday tasting it was a victim of circumstance. It has a slight roughness to it that you don't find in their regular Carneros Pinot Noir. Compared with the Reynolds Family, the Acacia Estate Vineyard seemed overly rustic, and those deep blueberryish tones that I normally like in Acacias came off as rubbery and, some thought, chemical. It probably would have been fine before the Reynolds, but sometimes order is everything.
     I'm pretty sure that our next stop was the 2001 Betts & Scholl Barossa Valley Grenache, a fabulous, understated-for-Australia wine that Jon had deeply discounted on his "just trust me" shelf. Man, I was in love with this wine for a couple of months last year.
     And I know we tasted the 2002 Peter Lehmann Barossa Valley Clancy's Red. I forget where we went from there. By that point in the red wine marathon, the room was pretty happy. Probably for the better that someone stopped me from opening a pricey Amarone I've been sitting on for a year and a half.
 :: posted by Dante Ramos at 9:05 PM
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