Over the weekend, I finally drank the last remaining bottle from the first case of wine I ever bought, the 2002 Shotfire Ridge Cuvee from Thorne-Clarke. This wine was one of those Robert Parker stunners a few years back - a sub-$15 wine that earned a ridiculously high score (93 or 94 points I think). After finding one bottle and enjoying it, I immediately went for a case purchase when I was able to locate it in Charlottesville (the '02 vintage never made it to Atlanta, only future years). This wine has changed its blend over the years, and '02 was really a very Bordeaux-like wine with no Shiraz component, instead blending Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot. I decided to work through the case slowly to see how the wine evolved, and managed to actually see it through a dumb phase before a somewhat well-aged wine came back around about a year ago.
This final bottle came about 5 months after my previous tasting, and the wine was about as I remembered - no longer an Aussie fruit bomb, it had softened up and had some more nuanced flavors. Unfortunately to me, the Cabernet Sauvignon really had dominated the other components at this juncture, and that's not really a great high point for me. Overall, the wine had become just a decent older Cab, nothing more. It's a good wine, one that I'd give 87-88 points, but certainly not the high flyer it was originally rated years ago.
What I'll remember most about this wine was the evolution I got to experience in having so much of it so that I could really track and see how it aged. It's the first time I was really able to do that, and for that reason, this was a great wine experience for me.
1 comment:
I still have a bottle of this stuff. Sounds like I can 1) drink now and have a decent table wine, or 2) hang on to it a little longer and either see if the remaining light totally goes out or if it will evolve into a white dwarf that still has a few years of good life left.
Post a Comment