2004 Plumpjack Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve (Stelvin Closure)

Community Tasting Notes (1) Avg Score: 91 points

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  1/13/2009 - City Wine Journal wrote: 91 Points

  Purchased upon release. Decanted for about 2 hours. Black, deep, eddying and highly reflective. Absolutely huge wine, like biting a giant super-ripe blackberry dipped in vanilla-caramel candy. Thick, sweet, decadent, overwhelming. 15.5% alcohol, and it drank higher than that. Massive, erasing and resetting your entire palate. I can think of nothing to pair with this wine except maybe a cigar. Exceptionally polished, reflecting its state-of-the-art production -- cold soak, fermentation, extended lees maceration and extraction, malolactic-in-barrel, 100% new oak, extra long aging... whew, it's all there. More impressive and interesting than satisfying. And I don't know that it will "evolve" over time, but it should certainly hold a while. Gorgeous glass & label, by the way.
  
  In an unplanned but quite instructive experiment, this massive CA Cab stood in complete contrast to the terroir-driven 2006 Pétrus tasted earlier in the day (they do malolactic in tank, not in barrel which tends to "homogenize" the wine and erase the effects of terroir, in their experience). Others will love this super-tanker wine more than me, and I will happily downgrade to the "mainstream" Plumpjack in the future, which I have enjoyed many times.

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