WTN: 02 Geyserville and a question about ABV and age

Last night, with our leftover lamb shawarma, we had one of two remaining bottles of Ridge 2002 Geyserville. The last time we had a bottle of this was in 2017. That was a great showing -- really aromatic, complex, and integrated. This was good but not great: there were some interesting underbrush aromatics on opening, but they were quickly subsumbed into a not-unpleasant but kinda overbearing blackberry liqueur nose and palate, with some bittersweet chocolate on the finish. The fruit still seemed quite fresh, actually, and not especially tertiary, and the color, while not as saturated as in its youth, was bright and fresh-looking, which is to say the bottle didn't have other signs of decrepitude. (Same purchase as the 2017 bottle and storage before and after 2017 was in a temp-controlled warehouse.) Over the course of two hours, it didn't move much, except that I noticed the alcohol more, mostly because the rest of it wasn't so engaging. (I would say: it wasn't explicitly hot but it was tiresomely big.) So: this could be bottle variation; it could be evidence of overall decline.

But here's my two-part question, for people who've been following Geyserville since the very start or at any rate earlier than 1998, which I think was the first vintage I purchased. First, I assume that the ABV range in the last couple of decades is at least a bit higher than previously (for the 23 vintages from 1999-2021, 16 were 14.5 or above, max 14.9). Is that right? Second, are there any useful generalizations about how relatively high-alcohol and relatively low-alcohol Geyservilles age? I'm asking partly just out of curiosity, and partly in order to decide whether to make a chemistry experiment of my final bottle of the 02 and hold it another 5-10 years to see what happens. This bottle still seemed to have enough youth, in some respects, that I imagine it might actually continue to develop -- but I worry that the alcohol will just get more and more prominent. (This will probably also affect my drinking strategies with wines like Once & Future).

[David M. Bueker]

Interesting question, and one that I have not pondered so analytically on any regular basis.

That being said, I will caution against using Geyserville as a guidepost for Once & Future. Joel Peterson's wines have had consistently higher acidity than Ridge wines - at least by taste. Maybe the O&F Teldeschi could be a good comp (Teldeshi's Dry Creek with some similarity to Geyserville's Alexander Valley), but I would not use the same logic for Old Hill or Dickerson.

p.s. I looked up the 1996 and 1995 Geyserville on CellarTracker, and the bottle photos showed the alcohol levels for both. The 1996 was 14.9%, and the 1995 was 14.2%, so same ballpark. You can probably go spelunking for more data.

Thanks, David, on both fronts. I only gathered data back to 99 because that's what was easily available on the Ridge website, but yeah, CT photos should help (especially if I use my desktop monitor). I appreciate the point about acidity in O&F, too. I did have a sense even as I was writing that I don't find O&F tiring to drink at comparable ABVs, but I hadn't really thought through why that might be.

That said, the Ridge "winemaking information" tab only gives pH over the last few vintages, and Geyserville isn't substantially different from, e.g., O&F Old Hill (a couple of vintages just over 3.5, one just under 3.75; basically the same range for Joel). TA isn't listed at all for Geyserville, so no easy way to compare, there. But I know you said "at least by taste," and that feels intuitively right to me, whatever the chemistry is.

I am a long time fan and buyer of the Geyserville, although not in recent years - I am down to only a few bottles of the 95 and 98 now. Thanks for the reminder - I'll have to open one soon and post a note.