Chambers Street brought in a nice cellar of California wines and I snapped up this bottle of 2000 A. Rafanelli Zinfandel. Note follows:
4/27/2019 - This is drinking like a champ. I last drank a bottle of this wine in 2002, so I hardly remember the sensory experience, but amazingly enough there is my note on CellarTracker from then that I can refer to. If this was dark and rich then, now it’s dark and rich and mostly resolved, but still with great vigor and surprisingly sharp and spiky acidity. The color is a bit brown, the nose is a bit brown and lightly milky, but the wine has good life and has done the zin-to-claret morph with aplomb. Further, this is the very definition of integrated oak, where the new oak signature is as present as it ever was, only seamlessly integrated within the whole. Just a terrific wine.
This sets a record for me as the longest period between tasting notes on the same wine. Seventeen years! Where has all the time gone. My interests have shifted profoundly from then, ever toward “old world” wines. You know the story.
Anyway, here’s my note from 2002:
7/28/2002 - Dark red-purple. Dark, brooding aromas of blackberry/zinberry. Concentrated, heavy, rich zinfandel, very heady and densely packed with flavors of dark berries and spice. Deep in a Ridge Zin manner. Very much heavier than the 1999 Rafanelli Zin, which, if I recall, leaned more toward the spicy raspberry/blackberry profile. The 2000 is sensational, with much more structure and depth than virtually any other 2000 Zin I have yet had, most of which have been hot/flabby/soft/forgettable.