huevos con vino

Last night we headed over to my friend’s house, the one with half of my wine collection in the basement cellar.  We wound up spending nearly an hour talking about wine and staring at the bottles.  That’s sort of an ideal Saturday night for me, but I doubt my wife would find it that much fun.  She was upstairs.

Anyway, we pulled out a bottle of 2003 Pepper Bridge Cabernet Sauvignon.  Pepper Bridge is a product of the Pepper Bridge Winery in the Walla Walla Valley of Eastern Washington State.  Although their Web site seems a bit confused as to whether the winery is Walla Walla Winery or Pepper Bridge Winery, you’ll find this wine for $50 under the Pepper Bridge name.

Pepper Bridge makes Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, with a couple of Cabernet Sauvignon single-vineyard releases to boot.  I had never tried this particular winery’s products before, but I have seen them around town for a while.  My friend and I were both eager to give this wine a try, even if it is still quite young.  Then again, I had a 2002 Hestan Cabernet Sauvignon in May 2005 and it was incredible, so it’s always possible to enjoy a wine while it’s still young!

The 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon features a blend that relies mainly on the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, which could be a mistake.  More on that later, though.  At 95.5% Cabernet Sauvignon, this wine only has room for a splash of Malbec and Merlot.  About 2/3 of the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes came from the Seven Hills Vineyard, while the rest came from the Pepper Bridge Vineyard; both vineyards are profiled here on the winery Web site.  The wine was released in the summer of 2006 so it has had some time to settle in the cellar.  With 2/3 new French oak, the flavors should really pop on the palate.

We decanted the wine in our glasses for over an hour and ended up finishing the bottle.  While I did like this wine, I don’t think I would pay $50 for it.  Here are my thoughts:

• Aroma: Buttered toast and black fruit with acid at first, opened up into a more complex bouquet of blackberries, black cherries, oak, toast, and an almost campfire-type aroma after a while.
• Flavor: Smooth cherry and blackberry after some decanting, not much tannic structure; fairly simple and not very alluring overall.
• General impression: This wine left me a bit flat; the flavor was nice but the body wasn’t there.  A little thin, lacking some of the structure and muscle you expect from a Cabernet Sauvignon.

I have tried several good Washington State Cabernet Sauvignon wines and I have yet to be as impressed as I get when I try a comparable California Cabernet.  I take this as a sign to try more Washington State Cabernet Sauvignon wines before I make any kind of sweeping generalization about them.  Still, it is disappointing to taste a wine that simply lacks the “stuffing,” or “brawn,” or “muscle,” or whatever you want to call that secondary flavor profile that was missing from this wine.  Without it, this wine tasted more like a watery Pinot Noir than a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Bordeaux-styled red. 

I know that sounds harsh, and I don’t mean to be overly critical as the wine was clearly well made, but it tasted incomplete to me.  Perhaps the blend would have benefitted from more Malbec, or a different balance of Cabernet Sauvignon grape sources.  Who knows?  I do know that I want to try the single-vineyard releases before I make up my mind about Pepper Bridge as a winery.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 10:29 am and is filed under wine review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.