Last week, a friend who raids his mother's root cellar from time to time for wine, brought a 1986 Mt. Eden Vineyards Estate Pinot Noir to dinner. Damn, those really were the good old days, this wine was only 12.2% alcohol--see, it can be done! Somewhat faded but still stately, this wine from 2000 ft elevation in the Santa Cruz Mountains showed lovely old pinot flavors of tea and potpourri, with a little caramel on the long, lazy finish. An honor to drink.
Then last Friday night we decided we wanted pinot with whatever we were having for dinner. I pulled an orphan, the 2003 Belle Glos for the Sonoma Coast's Taylor Lane Vineyard in Sonoma County, which is notable for being from Chuck Wagner of Caymus fame. BLECH! Saturated, extracted black raspberry and plum flavors open into a bitter and unpleasant 70% unsweetened cocoa flavor cave of a place while biggest legs I've ever seen run down the inside of the glass. The label says 14.6% alcohol, but it tastes like 16 and I can't drink this. Go back to cabernet, Chuck.
So we set that aside, and I pulled a 2000 St. Innocent Brickhouse Vineyard pinot noir. Not an auction wine where provenance is unknown, but one purchased by the case directly from the winery and cellared impeccably since, this wine continues to confound me. Though I normally leave St. Inno pinots for eight years, we accidentally opened one about a year ago and was surprised to run into that prunes-in-soy sauce flavor that is the death rattle of pinot, so I've been trying them on a six month schedule since. This is perhaps the worst bottle yet, but it is just further down the path I feared this wine was on and time alone could account for that--this wine is dying, and it never really lived. I let it sit on the counter for two days, and of course the necritis only worsened. Crap, a whole case!
So we set THAT aside and opened another Sonoman, the 1995 Swan Estate Pinot Noir. The wine was brown and smelly, and went straight down the drain. So back to the cellar for a second bottle fo the same wine, and the second bottle was much better than the first, and at last we had a drinkable pinot, but these too are heading downhill from their peak about two years ago. I was a fool not to drink them up then, but memories of the '85 danced in my head, and I foolishly thought these might be 20 year wines, too.