1994 Chateau Ste Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon Weinb

[bills]

1994 Chateau Ste Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon Weinbau Vineyard– not too dark, and clear with almost no sediment in the bottle. Some sweetish vanilla in the nose, and good fruit, and on the palate there is abundant though softening tannin near the end that give an impression of it being leaner than it really is. The flavours are well defined and the wine will probably not get any better than it is now.

I looked at these notes and I thought that I was damning the wine with faint praise – and then I realised why! I do a lot of blind tasting, and I went back and assessed the wine as if I didn’t know what it was – and found that I had been prejudiced by the fact that it was a Washington cabernet and that I had expectations for that sort of wine, and a mental set of benchmarks that I automatically measured such wines against. Going back to the beginning allowed me to judge it simply as a cabernet of indeterminate origin, and I found the wine to be very Bordeaux like outside of the context I’d been forcing it into, and it came off with a much better overall impression than it had the other way. A lesson – to keep an open mind on these things. Wish I had some more – I’d love to put it into a blind tasting of Bordeaux and see what others would do with it in THAT preconceived set of expectations. I expect it would fit right in! I doubt this wine has ever been reviewed – they don’t make much of the reserve single vineyard stuff. We picked this up after tasting in 97 on a trip in our old Jensen.

Edited December 10, 2004 by bills (log)