Good ruby with garnet edges and a tad milky.  A bit bretty for the first hour.  Big euc and lettuce-sap breathes out to SERIOUSLY worn leather, salted caramel and pitch.  Fruit requires a bit of a search.  It’s in there, but not lively and whatever erstwhile brightness it had is now focused in the pruney direction–barely fending off the AL.  Have had a few of these over the past decade, and although never sublime, they are interesting for their rarity and the fact the label on the current Saxby version has nary a pen-stroke changed.  This is not an unpleasant wine, and it never appears necessarily *past its prime* almost as if it has never had a prime.  It just maintains the same fairly pleasing and curious mediocrity year after year.  In the mouth, an immediate full expanse of structure does nothing to dispel the rumors of lacking fruit, the flinty, graphite tannins–lively with gripping acid and AL–make for a watery and un-elegant core and a singed citrus-rind dominates what is left of your fruit.
♦
2004 Saxby Cabernet Sauvignon Paso Robles San Luis Obispo County 14-0