About a month ago, Ms Cocktail came home with a wine that she said she had heard about somewhere or other. As with most things wine related, this promised to be an adventure. I don’t always take other people’s word about 
whether a wine is good or not. A lot of people I know may enjoy wine a lot but they don’t have that educated of a palate. Therefore, they drink what they like and pass those recommendations on. Let me be crystal clear on this subject. This is perfectly acceptable behavior and I don’t want them to change a thing. In fact, I prefer that they approach wine this way rather than trying to pretentious and annoying in their certainty.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that what they like is something that I will particularly like. We all have different palates as well as likes and dislikes. Which is why some of us attempt to describe the wines we drink with terms that other people will be familiar with. It tastes like jam or apricots or chocolate. This gives a basis for making wine selections that are agreeable with our palates. Just because someone says, “This wine is fruit forward with lots of blackberry” doesn’t mean I will like it, but it puts it in the realm of something I generally like.
This is where the adventure starts. Because I may have a preconception of what someone else thinks the wine tastes like, that doesn’t mean that I will taste the same thing or like what I taste. I therefore approach each wine the same way regardless of what I’ve heard about it. Which means that I dismissed the glowing report Ms Cocktail had heard and stuck the bottle in my wine rack and didn’t think much about it.
So last night when I got home from band rehearsal, Ms Cocktail and I had one of our favorite dinners. A loaf of bread, some cheese, some sardines, pickled vegetables of some sort and some fresh fruit, in this case red raspberries. With this, we’ll usually grab a bottle of wine to wash it down with. Knowing that I had an article to write, I decided to grab a wine I knew nothing about in order to have something to review. My hand landed on the bottle my wife had brought home, a 2007 Ghost Pines Cabernet Sauvignon.
Here is a California wine that truly is a wine of California. Does that sound cryptic or redundant? Well, maybe but it is also the truth. The wine maker, Louis M. Martini, took juice from two separate regions in California and blended them to create this wine. In fact, it is 59% juice from Napa County and 41% juice from Sonoma County. What he ended up with is a wine that is not a big California cab, but one that is a little softer but also to my palate, a better package.
The wine starts by presenting a nice dark ruby color that allows a bit of light through. You can feel a touch of a burn from the 13.9% ABV but it is subtle and well integrated into the nose that carries a blend of berry and cherry along with a light touch of oak and moss. On the tongue you can taste the berry/cherry blend along with a touch of vanilla. The tannins are present but not pronounced even though it is their presence that remains on the tongue after the fruit is gone.
This wine definitely benefits from a decanting and will take to aging well. It will pair well with just about everything you would think about pairing a cabernet sauvignon with, from a pork roast to a rib eye to spicy puttanesca. It’s also a bargain coming in at under $20. This is one instance where I could have taken the other person’s review as correct.
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