By: Ryan Tedder
A dear friend came by this week and he told us he is moving to Hawaii next week! As sad as we are to see him go we are very happy about being able to go visit him! Always a lover of only the best wines, he decided to pop some of his best to celebrate a safe voyage.
We started with 1978 Perrier Jouet Fleur Rose out of magnum. This wine is a year older than me and it was simply fantastic. It was tight out of the bottle but blossomed quickly. Dried roses, frozen raspberries, underripe peach, apricot, orange peel and red currant filled the glass. The wine was still powerfully textured, full of chalky minerality and fat and long on the palate-a real stunner!
Next we popped an ancient bottle of 1968 Vega Sicilia Unico that was equally awesome. The pedigree of this wine was hard to not be impressed with. It took 30 minutes to open up and it really started wowing at an hour. The layers of tobacco, coffee grounds, espresso, stewed red plums, strawberry, fig, Medjool date, walnut, gravel, and pork. The Unico was still very well endowed and the size in the mouth was stunning. This is a bucket list wine.
The hits just kept coming! 1997 Colgin Herb Lamb Cabernet Sauvignon was a beast of a wine that still had unbelievably ripe fruit, velvety yet grippy mountain tannins, a nice herbal back note of thyme, marjoram, and green tobacco, and one of those long milk chocolate and caramel finishes. If you want one of the best wines in the world that just tastes damn good and doesn’t have to be explained to you-it really is hard to beat Colgin Herb Lamb. Too bad they aren’t making it any more:( The 1994 was a little more red-fruited and seductive for my taste comparatively but its like rating the 1994 as 100 and the 1997 as 99-more personal preference than anything.
We also had a great magnum of 1998 Phelps Insignia that was drinking like perfectly aged, sweetly fruited Bordeaux and our new “house favorite” 2010 White Burg, the 2010 Domaine Ardhuy Corton Charlemagne Grand Cru. If you have gotten an email about this wine from us-you need to pick up some of this one. A dazzling wine of richness, complexity and nuance-just a stunner.