Bill S. wrote:
> We did a Zinfandel blind tasting recently, a departure for most of us
> that rarely drink zins (although I have been a long time fan).

> 1979 Monterey Peninsula Winery Wilpete Farms Willow Creek Zinfandel
> (13.9% - I figured that I’d fool them and bring a really venerable
> bottle that I’d picked up in the early 80s at the winery when I’d been
> down in Monterey racing old sports cars. Well, it wasn’t really at
> the winery, it was at a small sales room off the main road where all
> sorts of things were sold. I recall standing next to a rather large
> (and loud) lady at the tasting room bar. We were tasting through a
> range of single vineyard low production zins. She said (well, more
> bellowed) that the ‘Monterey Nights’ (or whatever forgettable name it
> was called) red wine she’d just tasted was ‘Damned fine” and that
> she’d buy a gallon jug…..
>
> This wine was huge when young and needed many years to become
> drinkable. I’d opened a bottle a few years ago and it was corked, so I
> crossed my fingers and tried my last one. The wine was almost pinot
> noir in colour, although without the brick tinge normally found with
> mature pinots. The mature nose had some spice interest. The wine slid
> across the tongue smoothly (as, I suppose, had the Monterey Nights,
> come to that, but I refrained from finding out back in the day), and
> had lost all tannin, but retained some cassis flavour and medium
> length. Everyone pretty much liked it.

Fun tasting, Bill, and great story to boot! As I no doubt have
mentioned before, when I moved to NYC (with two cases of wine in tow) I
had to adjust to the lack of availability of many of the wines I'd been
drinking in CA. In '87 or '88, though, Jean and I stumbled across a
cache of '79 Monterey Peninsula Zin in a small, otherwise forgettable
liquor store on Broadway near Columbia. For the next few months, we
drank down their stock which at that point was rounding into shape and
quite drinkable (owing no doubt to the advanced aging due to poor storage)

> 1997 Turley Old Vines Zin – the first of a string of Turleys, this one

IIRC, '97 was the vintage in which Turley turned down the volume
slightly and started making more balanced wines. Interesting to hear
how these have aged.


> 1995 Rosenblum Late Harvest Zin – sweet simple nose, with
> concentration overwhelming any complexity, very sweet in the mouth,
> pleasant, and with the fruit settling in as red rather than black
> after a bit. Not bad – I could almost but not quite forgive them for
> using the same sort of foo-foo tall, small diameter half size bottle
> that many of our BC wineries use for their hyped up so called ice
> wines. If you want a zin to serve in little chocolate cups, this is
> it. Also not my style of zin, and a waste of grapes that might
> otherwise have been used in a decent dry wine.

In the old days ('70s) these "late harvest" Zins were often the result
of a stuck fermentation. These days, with all the designer yeasts
available to winemakers, I don't know if stuck fermentations still
happen, but perhaps we can explain this wine away as an unfortunate
accident ;-)

Mark Lipton