Here’s another one I’m gonna chalk up to the chubby chubby 12 issue. Yes, I know it’s your favorite vintage of the teens, and for exactly the same reason I have hated it and predicted terrible things. Big, lush, ripe, 90+ wines of yummy flab and syrupy deliciousness which Just. Can’t. Go. The. Distance. Ten years. That’s all we ask. Is that too much? For some, it is. And this is a great wine, one of the last bottles in my cellar from Tom Pelter at Calistoga Wine Stop. He always recommended the BEST unknown cabs and he liked structure. But this wine is not partucularly gorgeous today, and I can tell you why: I should have drank it 5 years ago. Astonishing, to think a Napa cab can’t go past a half-decade, but in my experience with *lovely* years like 2012, NOTHING surprises. I doomed 12 from the very beginning, and (as usual) was right. Just like I was right about 11. I’m drinking all my 12’s. That’s my fuckin goal: Drink all my 12’s before they turn eleven. So I’ve got a few months.
Surprisingly amber-brown in the glass. A nose of early maderization blows off a *little*, but not enough for redemption. It continues the cheery, tainted-acidic over-feel in the bouquet where tired fruit has lost its stuffing and the wasted stuffing is still visible. It’s a fairly vague cesspool of nuances, none of which really compel one toward quality cab, and tiredness revels.
Drinking it is not a horrible affair and I will probably drink this wine all night. I’ve been too hard on it already and it’s not *that* bad. It’s just….. tired. Really fatigued–as the French would say–but gritty down where lavish berry resided now reduced to sweet glimpses of acid and tannin and fruit actually beautiful in a raspberry, strawberry sort of thinnish way. Completely drinkable–glimpses of beauty, even–but with asterisks of fade. Very elegant fade, but beautiful Cab able to go the distance doesn’t taste like this. Muddy to the end. I highly recommend these wines–I really do. Ray and team are doing amazing things in the 25$-range and this one just suffers from the 2012-disease of euphoria.
2012 EDGE Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.2
Stephen McConnell 