Community Tasting Note

rmalloy wrote:

Sunday, September 18, 2016 - Tasted blind. Purple-tinged ruby color. Tastes young and ripe. Fruit forward and simple, but pretty good weight. Ripe black cherry. Cinnamon, pepper, and slight hints of game. Drying tannins on at the finish are somewhat rough but useful in that they provide a modicum of seriousness to this wine.

I think this wine is full of grenache. My guess is that this is a young GSM wine from a not-very-prestigious region. I will guess Cotes du Rhone or something similar like Languedoc or a Spanish garnacha. I know there is a bottle of Tablas Creek Esprit de Beaucastel among the 18 wines in the blind sample set, and I really hope, for the sake of California and the good Beaucastel name, that this is something different.

Rating: 85

Non-blind p.s.: Oh no! I’ve been skeptical of Tablas Creek, so this isn’t a complete shocker. But this wine certainly tastes way more like a basic Cotes du Rhone than a good Chateauneuf du Pape. I found this inferior to every bottle of Chateau Beaucastel I've ever tasted.

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