Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull 2008, 5/10/2019

  (Full Pull & Friends CVBDX (FPF-30)) Hello friends. This is a special year for Full Pull. On October 5, we celebrate ten years in business. And yeah, I mean even in a boring old year like the ninth or eleventh anniversary, we’d scour the world of wine for incredible opportunities, but in this particular year, our spidey senses are on extra high alert. So you can imagine my delight when I learned that we had access to a wine from the 2008 vintage, a vintage we were selling when I launched FP back in 2009, and better yet, that we could put it under our exclusive Full Pull & Friends label: This is the exact same winery from whom we sourced our other three CVBDX wines: the 2007 (offered in 2014); the 2009 (offered in 2017); and the 2011 (offered in 2018). So you may be wondering how we jumped into this particular DeLorean and scored a parcel of 2008. Here’s how it went down. Way back in 2014, we tasted a sample of the 08 CVBDX. And it was fabulous. But at the same time, we tasted a sample of a Walla Walla Bordeaux blend from the same winery. Which was also great. And at the time, our priority was the wine that became the WWBDX, because it seemed like more of a rare bird: the chance to put a Walla Walla blend under our private label. I think the wisdom of that has been borne out, as that 2008 WWBDX is still the only vintage we’ve offered to date. By the time we received our next set of samples from this winery a year later, it was the 2009 CVBDX that they sent. I assumed that the 2008 was all gone, and they assumed that we had moved on from the 2008s. Fast forward a few years to me inquiring about any special tenth anniversary parcels, and the response was: We still have a bit of that 2008 Bordeaux Blend kicking around. Interested? We asked for fresh samples, just to be safe, but I was confident that it would be holding up great, and sure enough, it was. Is 2008 perhaps the sneaky-best vintage of the past 20 years in Washington? There’s an argument to be made. I know many prefer the riper 2007s and 2012s, but for me, the 2008s have this extra kick of acid-driven freshness that makes it potentially a longer-lived vintage. But just a moment; let me step back and offer a quick paragraph on the FP&F project: Full Pull & Friends is our opportunistic negociant label whereby we purchase barrels or shiners that our longtime partner wineries have available for all sorts of different reasons, put our own abstract labels on them, and offer them exclusively to our list members as outstanding values. This is the 30th entry into the FPF canon, and of the previous 29, only three wines are still available; the others are sold out. See this page for details, and shoot us an email if you’re interested in scoring any of FPF-26, -27, or -29. Now then, this particular FP&F wine spent a good long time in French oak, about 50% new. The fruit comes from outstanding vineyards (which by agreement must remain nameless), and it is a blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, and Malbec (no precise percentages, but the varieties are in order of their proportion in the blend). It clocks in at 14.5% alc and begins with a nose containing deep and varied layers of fruit – fresh blackcurrant and black plum, dried cherry and apricot and mango – paired to wonderful maturing notes of loamy earth and dust and mushroom. The palate is clearly in mid-peak-drinking, with rapidly resolving tannins framing plush fruit, insistent fecund earthiness, and still-lively ’08 acidity. While there’s still plenty of structure to augur well for another ten years, this is really bringing a lot of pleasure right now, that left brain/right brain intellectual/sensual thrill that only maturing bottles can provide.