This just came across the transom in an email today for the 2008 Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon:
“This is mind-blowing on the nose with sweet tobacco, chocolate, cedar, cigar box, and licorice. Full-bodied and round with a bright and velvety tannin structure. Starts off slow, but then flies away. This is fabulous. Intense finish. Delicious today, but will be even better after 2013.”
First, I wouldn’t use “blowing” and “nose” in the same sentence. Second, better after 2013? Wow, that’s a real cellar candidate!
Suckling used to do this in his WS Bordeaux reviews too - telling people they could start drinking first growths and the like just a few years after release. I never understood why; surely he knows better. I figured maybe that WS realized if it told the truth about typical maturity curves - that those wines take 25 years or more to reward cellaring - they would lose the 95% of their audience that isn’t serious enough to make that commitment. In Caymus’s case I guess his estimate is about right though - funny indeed.
I have some young friends whose wallets are more “developed” than their palates… I know of a retailer selling this for wine for a great price, and even though I import a stupid good barolo that retails for 1/3 of the cost (and even has Suckling pts!), they can’t lap up this juice fast enough… I want to “hrrrummpphhhhh” mind-blowing noses and fruit flying from the glass til the cows come home, too, but I’m so jealous that this is what so many people want to hear/read…
Absolutely not, Todd. That’s the problem w/ you young squirts…never get to enjoy some of life’s pleasures. Why…why…I just bet you’ve never
got to experience the thrill of running your fingernails down a chalkboard. You ever done see’d a chalkboard, even??
Cedar has a lot of manifestations. There’s the smell of a cedar chest w/ all your Mom’s Victoria’sSecret stash hidden away. There’s
the smell of a cedar plank. Sometimes just after roasting fresh salmon on it. There’s the smell of pencil shavings fresh out of a pencil sharpner, cedar mixed w/ graphite.
There’s the smell of a cedar cigar box, cedar intermixed w/ cigar tobacco. The smell of tobacco in a cardboard tobacco carton. The smell of
tobacco freshly loaded into a pipe. The smell of fresh/moist tobacco inside a RoiTan tin. All very distinct smells from my childhood…which was not all that
long ago I should add.
Tom