I have never had Merryvale Starmont before.  There.  I said it.  I’ve had Profile and several other–even cheaper–Merryvale bottles, but for some reason, I never ONCE had the urge to pick up Starmont.  I dunno… it just looked *cheap*, and while I LOVE second labels, I never picked this one up.  I remember when it first came out.  And it sits there on the same shelf as BV Ruth, Ber KV, Mt Vdr napa, Franciscan, CdV and all the other old-school Napa cabs in the 25-30$ range–ALL of which can run good-to-excellent year-to-year.  Not really a huge fan of Profile, so maybe that had something to do with it.  I always figured Starmont to be a huge, over-ripe oak-bomb but I was totally wrong.  It is really quite a spicy, acidic quaff.  The nose is all nutmeg and cinnamon, acid and alcohol, with very little fruit.  The fruit peeps through the SLIGHT maderization later on, but barely.  It is spicy, acidic and moderately tannic, and these three things show impressive polish, it’s just there is so little fruit and no fruit to polish.  Deep staining garnet and barely bricking.  It is a shame to talk about an 08 so disparagingly, but I feel this is a direction ALL of these multi-thousand-case supermarket 30$ 2nd-shelfers have gone in the past decade.  There’s just no there there. The bouquet in the empty glass is not hardcore oak–as I suspected–but rather really polished briar.  In a crowd of people who appreciate older, not-especially-super-extracted-fruit cabs, this would be a winner.

2008 MERRYVALE Starmont Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.5

http://www.starmontwinery.com