I have this thing I have done in wine country for DECADES and that is where I will pick one winery I have never heard of to visit as I am driving around. It can’t be one I’ve been meaning to try or one I’ve heard things about or something I’ve read about. It has to be ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY COMPLETELY NEVER HEARD OF IT BEFORE IN MY LIFE. As you can imagine, there have been a lot of surprises, a lot of disapointments, and some discovered gems. This is one of those stories.
These people make a LOT of wines. We must have tasted 10 and even skipped a few. All of them were solid, no issues, and decent values. I picked a couple to bring home and play with!
Dark ruby with a touch of garnet in the edge. Ridiculously fruit-forward nose, just pure raw bright fresh juicy berry and floral with a bit of powdery cellar and briar backing it up. An absolute fruit BOMB in the mouth, charming and lovely and unabashedly jovial and yummy. Of course, for me to like this wine–and better yet to buy it and put it on the blog–you all know it’s gotta have some UMPH to back it up. Well, it does. Right about the time you think it might be cloying, rife acidity and green tannins arch their back, exposing a backbone pressed tight under all that fleshy fruit.
Easy-going and delicious, it has something both the 99 and the 1% will find interesting. A perfect “table wine”, it would serve equally well as a slightly chilled quaffer or a meal-time partner. It probably should be dranken out of squat, heavy tumblers with your elbows on the table, but tonight it is getting the pinkies-out treatment–and loving it.
2016 SARZOTTI VINEYARD ‘Vin Tavola’ cab/SY 70/30 Paso Robles 13.7
Stephen McConnell 