We drank some very nice wines for my wife's birthday recently:
2009 Peter Michael Sauvignon Blanc L'Apres-Midi Knights Valley. This is just a tremendous wine all around. It’s loaded with full aromas of fresh figs, sliced melon, apricots, wet stones, minerals and a bit of soft oak in the background. In the mouth, you really notice the fine weight and the concentrated flavors of melon, apricot, pear and oak spices. Although it’s packed with rich flavors, it still has a nice subtle underlying acidity that lends a fine twang to the delicious finishing kick.
2003 Peter Michael Chardonnay La Carrière Knights Valley. This is a slightly darker gold color than the previous two bottles of this we’ve opened. Still, it delivers the goods on the nose, with lovely and exotic aromas of fig, hazelnut, lemon peel, butterscotch, honeycomb, nutmeg, granite and oak. It’s really expansive and richly-flavored on the palate, with tons of praline, nut, fig, lemon meringue, clove and baking spice flavors that have solid weight, depth and density. It’s so much fun to drink, but I do feel like it’s getting to be time we finish our stash of these.
1989 Château Cos d'Estournel St. Estèphe. There’s an absolutely fantabulous nose to this wine, full of classic aromas of leather, green pepper, tobacco leaf, cracked peppercorns, dirt pile, tomato plant, charred wood, pencil shavings, iron ore, ink and black currants. As it sits in the glass during the evening, the redder currant and cassis fruit aromas flow forward and begin to really integrate beautifully, too. It’s wonderfully savory and fruity, showing gorgeous layering and delightful cohesiveness of personality. On the palate, it’s still fairly rigid in structure and showing a tensile backbone, but the tannins seem nicely refined at this stage of the game. The texture can be a bit sticky, but the wine is so powerfully flowing and loaded with ropy black cherry, red currant, licorice rope and strong savory earth flavors that you hardly notice. It finishes wiry and lithe, with a fairly serious feel to it, but it’s incredibly rewarding to drink and a great vintage of Cos for my money. Drink or hold.
2002 Match Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon Butterdragon Hill Napa Valley. Served from a 375 ml bottle, this wine exhibits very nice aromas of blueberries, black plums, dark-roasted coffee, campfire embers and cedar wood that are rich and full but nicely contained and directed. In the mouth, it’s lush and gently jammy, with sweet-toned blueberry and black currant fruit leading the way. It’s very smoothly polished and luscious, with some cooler earth tones settling in with time in the glass. The tannins seem quite nicely resolved and the wine just seems so pure and delicious that it’s easy to overlook how impressively-made it is.
-Michael