Inky ruby with thin ambering edges. Staining with surprisingly considerable sed. Crazy fake mint-chocolate chip bouquet rises up from a fat glycerin-ridden base of fruit headed dangerously into prune. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and malt balls. Holy crap just THINK of a confection and this personifies it. Everything rich and over-blown and smeared heavily over a layer of *fabric store*. Oh, you can go on and on about the leather and tobacco and minerality all you want but this is just a plain old over-extracted, manipulated sugary muss. I know I can be a moving target on “yumminess” in wine, but this thing is just gaggingly ridiculous. In the mouth, an intense eucalyptus and growing tannin manage to redeem it a tad. It tastes A LOT better than it smells. In the mouth it can easily pass off as a big bruiser of a Napa cab, concentrated and brooding, packed with the more serious versions of each of the bouquet-items. Where we had mint chocolate chip, we have 65% cacao Andes. Where we had Whoppers, we have dusted truffles. Grainy, intense structural components grow directly from the generous acid evident early-on and do their part to obscure the opulent–but steroidal–fruit. I am so torn on this bottle. I hate the way it smells. I love the way it tastes. I could see it settling down into something fairly amazing.
2011 CEDAR KNOLL Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.2
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