Thursday, October 1, 2009

Wolf Blass 2002 Red Label Shiraz-Cabernet Sauvignon (Australia)

Once upon a time Wolf Blass was a very colourful winery. What I mean by that is that they had a label colour for every colour in the rainbow. The benefit of that was that if you liked a wine all you had to do was remember the colour of the label. Then, a few years ago they decided that they had too many colours, so they made the decision to "simplify" the choices ... since then I haven't been able to figure out the Wolf Blass labeling scheme. It used to be that Yellow Label, which was the most popular wine at the LCBO, was a Cabernet Sauvignon; the Red Label, which I liked better, was this Shiraz-Cabernet blend - it was also a tad less expensive. Tonight, I decided to check out my lone bottle of the old red label wine that I had left in the cellar (I also have an '04 Yellow Label kicking about, which I will try someday soon). This blend still had quite a bit of spicyness to it, so I thought that using my hand held Vinturi aerator would help. It did. The wine smoothed out immensely, making it have an almost creamy smooth mouth feel, yet it still retained that nice element of spice and pepper in the flavour department. Smells of dried dark fruit, namely blackberry, with nice vanilla oak tones. The palate delivered a little more with blackberries, sometimes of the dried and sweet variety, with hints of spice and those vanilla oak notes. This one needed that little nudge of decanting to turn it from decent to delicious.

No comments: