WTN: Ridge Alicante PaganiRanch '94...(short/boring)

Wanted something decent to drink w/ my pizza (no tofu) last night:
1. Ridge Calif Alicante PaganiRanch (77% AB/23% Zin; SonomaVlly; 13.5%; 32 brls; Bttld:April'96; 80 yr old vines; Drk: 2/96-2/01: PD) 1994: Very dark/near black color; strong earthy/dusty/old vine slight funky/leathery/sweaty leather/baseball glove w/ fresh Neat'sFootOil on a hot/Kansas summer day slight cedary/pencilly light boysenberry quite complex/rustic/Provencal nose; tart quite dusty/earthy/old vine rather rough/rustic fairly tannic/drying out/hard Languedoc-like slight smokey/pencilly/oak slight funky/sweaty leather slight boysenberry flavor; long rather hard/tannic somewhat dried-out rough/rustic light cedary/pencilly/oak quite dusty/earthy/old vine bit funky/sweaty leather finish; pretty hard & tannic but starting to dry out and only get more tannic; lovely/complex/interesting nose but drying out o the palate; drink up.
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And a wee BloodyPulpit:
1. Thought a MrRidge would be nice w/ pizza on a gold/blustery night, so spied a btl w/ a familar silver capsule (man...did I give Donn a raft of $hit when they started using those reddish/brown/silvery capsules on the 3Vllys), grabbed for it, saw the Pagani on the label...good choice...and just cracked that sucker open. Jeez.....this looks really dark for a 15 yr old Zin. Then I saw it....it was the Alicante...my oh my...my last btl of this wine. No choice but to go ahead & drink it. Decanted it off a bunch of sediment and drank away w/ mucho gusto.
Alicante is one of those (relatively) rare grapes known as a tenturier, a red grape w/ red/pigmented juice. According to my Enology text by Amerine & Ough, the juice of Alicante is very black (I once saw a friend's hands who had crushed some Alicante a week earlier...they were still stained black) and makes a very black wine, but the color is (supposedly) bot very stable and it tends to drop color and brown pretty fast in the btl. You sure couldn't tell it from this 15 yr old btl...black as the ace of spades. The next morning, when I examined my breakfast glass, there was a very slight bricking around the edge...but that was all.
2. Neat'sFootOil: Back in Kansas, it was handed down from father to son...when you got your first baseball glove, you also got a btl of Neat'sFootOil that you periodically applied to the glove to keep the leather soft & supple. It seemed to work. Certainly had a distinctive smell to it. I loved to smell the inside of my baseball glove (a Rawlings Eddie Yost model...one of my heros) on a hot Kansas summer day...special.
I always wondered why I never saw anyone applying Neat'sFootOil to their feet. Read the Wikipedia entry for the full story: Neat'sFootOil

Tom

Tom,

We had the same tradition in Massachusetts - Neats Foot Oil and Rawlings baseball gloves. No other brand was cool in the late 60s/early 70s. I still cherish my Brooks Robinson XFCB17.

What's more American than Rawlings and Ridge?!

from a web site selling old Rawlings gloves:

Like Bill Doak and Elmer Riddle gloves, there are about a million Brooks Robinson XFCB17 and XFCB30 gloves around. Why? Because they were SO popular, and it's easy to see why: nice thick leather, mid-size design, and the ever-popular HOF Brooks as endorser. Everybody wanted to get their own BR glove, and pretend to "own" the Hot Corner. Of all the many BR gloves I've seen over the years, I keep only those of best quality or condition. Condition rules on this beauty, as the pics show. I doubt it's been used but a few times, then tossed into a drawer for the next 30 years. It still needs to be broken in!

Thanks for the notes Tom~Ours are long gone~I remember the '96 being really nice back in the day, but those are gone too!