The fact that this was drinkable was a complete shock to us and I felt it was worth sharing here
1981 Gallo Family Vineyards / Gallo of Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon - USA, California (11/20/2022)
We have no idea what vintage this is – going by the copyright date of 1981 on the back of the bottle we will use that as the vintage. My partner has had this bottle for decades. This has not been stored in any proper conditions at all. Numerous heat waves. Multiple moves. Shoulder fill level. Needless to say this bottle was not stored in any proper way for at least 35 years
Cork came out with one piece using a Durand. It was completely saturated and might be the cheapest bottle I’ve used a Durand on. First glass was poured into some stemless glasses so we could avoid the effort of hand washing any crystal. To our shock, this was very much alive and interesting.
First glass: Nose of coffee, dark cocoa, unsmoked old cigars, and a bit of raisin. Medium light bodied, fully resolved, decent acidity, and shockingly drinkable. Palate of dark cocoa, plums, prunes, raisins, dried cherries, and spices. Very pleasant finish of roasted walnuts and almonds, dark cherries, and port like spices. Lingering stale unsmoked cigar finish.
I quite literally have to pinch myself – we were expecting this wine to be dead. Never stored right and we were expecting this to be undrinkable vinegar.
Second glass – this time in our usual Burgundy bowls with about an hour of air. Nose is developing nicely – more fruit – plums, dried dark cherries, dark cocoa, and spices. Palate is now somewhere between a Cab and Port. Nutty, dark dried red cherries, prunes, plums, spices, and tobacco. Finish is growing more toasted almond and nut forward with dark dried red cherries, cocoa and raisins.
I am totally shocked. Very lively and almost port like. We were expecting to dump this down the drain. Yet, we have something that is very intellectual. Might be my WOTY given the low expectations going in.
Somewhat confusingly, a web search shows the 1978 as the only vintage that had the front label split in two. Gallo also released some Sonoma and maybe Napa Cabs in 1978 and subsequent vintages, pretty solid wines.
Don’t sell Julio Gallo short. He was a very skilled wine maker, but he was a very skilled wine maker who wanted to sell massive amounts of wine. If you chose carefully, their mass market wines were quite good and an exceptional value. Gallo Family Vineyards showed what he could do when he produced wines at a more modest (for them) scale. While the wines would never knock your socks off the way some other producers could they were decent, sometimes better than decent, and once again were always a good value.
Never meant to sell Julio Gallo short here. If anything, I am impressed that this wine survived the awful treatment it had since purchasing. It makes me want to find someone who has cellared a bottle from this vintage with care and try it out.
Hi Daniel - more likely than not that is the legendary Gallo 1978 Cabernet Sauvignon…the vintage sticker once resided just above the “Limited Release” bikini label. Mostly Sonoma County fruit, it was Gallo’s first attempt to move up out of the lower end wines biz. Julio did not like malaolactic fermentation, however, preferring the wine to soften over time and it was pretty much hard as rock upon release. It was decades before Julio allowed (and likely, I just can’t recall, because of his death in the jeep rollover) malolactic fermentation in their red wines. My former COO was Ernest Gallo’s head of marketing in the 90’s and he often related to me the constant debate in the boardroom and Julio’s steadfast insistence that the reds would never undergo malo on his watch.
Thanks for the note, Daniel. These are always fun. Have had two good bottles of the '78 E&J Sonoma Reserve in the last two years. Bought on a whim and more than delivered.
Now that I have looked up all of the images, I am pretty sure this was the 1978. There was a lot of rumination this evening about this bottle after getting more details filled in.
Both of us are still impressed on how well it presented given how bad it was stored. I really think my partner is turning around on Cab as we find more people producing old school Sonoma cabs.
@Cameron_Hughes - Thanks for the history. It added a lot to the story of this bottle and helps cement why we will keep it on on display with our birth year bottles.
@Rich_Brown - Given some of our other interactions we’ve had here and the fact that someone thought you would have posted this wine here, it sounds like our palates might be aligned pretty well.
Yes, under normal circumstances the wine wouldn’t have been bottled until 1980 or 1981, and may have been held in bottle for a while. It was released in 1983.
It was quite a surprise when it was released. It may have been the first vintage dated wine E&J Gallo released, certainly the first Cab.
