Community Tasting Note

Moorese wrote:

Friday, March 31, 2006 - I want very much to like this wine. I am not sure that I do. When I popped the bottle, I could smell overwhelming oak from the cork alone. An hour later, I returned to see if perhaps the intense fake vanilla notes had subsided. The nose screams cherries jubilee, confectioner's sugar, and sourmash whiskey. The vanilla beans note is as pervasive as in many single barrel bourbons. Underneath this somewhat oppresive nose is a nice mouthful of spicy fruit, resplendent with the typical lush shiraz blackberry notes and pepper. There are gripping tannins competing with the fleshy fruit, but the wood simply dominates all right now. The wine finishes fairly long; but ultimately, all i can think of is how disappointing it is that a wine made from what I perceive to be spectacular fruit can be so undermined by heavy-handed oak treatment (and I like oak). While this wasn't an extremely pricey bottle ( I think it was in the neighborhood of $40-$50), it was highly regarded by our esteemed host and isn't that easy to stumble across on a shelf. I'll sit on my remaining bottles for a while in hopes that the whole damn thing settles down a bit, and it very well might. I freely admit to being somewhat of a novice in ascertaining how well (or poorly) a wine will age. Nevertheless, I'm not optimistic for the Gibson, and I genuinely hope I am wrong.

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