Showing better than my last bottle, over a year ago. Medium-to-full bodied and quite elegant. The palate is full of red and black fruits offering a surprising degree of freshness despite being 9 years old. There’s a blanket of fine grained tannins on the back end that provide a sense of grip and lead to a long, dusty finish. Excellent. (93 pts)
Andrew thanks for posting this. Always loved the Bressler wines - this was a good reminder I need to open one soon. Was very sorry they decided to stop production.
Yes, Karen, you’re right. I just meant that fans of Bressler should take advantage of the Young Vines while it is available. 2013-2015 are all still in the marketplace.
I just served my last bottle of 2001 paired with a 2001 Karl Lawrence. Both were perfectly on point with the nod going to Bressler. If I ever see either of them at auction I’ll make a move to get
One of our favorite wines for sure. We were lucky to try a 2000 which was their first vintage last weekend in Napa. It was in great shape with no signs of declining. A great wine for the vintage. We shared a bottle of the 12 last night with friends. They are not Cali Cab fans and they couldn’t stop talking about how much they enjoyed it. The 12 is a beauty and needs some decanting.
I do love these wines and will miss purchasing them. I believe selling the fruit and retiring from the day to day aspect was probably not too hard of a call.
Actually, my first direct purchase was the '04 cab and that was $75. The 06 was $85 and then the 2012 was $95 (offered in Jan 2016). While I have no idea what happened before I started buying, during my 8 years of buying directly from the winery, the cab went from $75-$95, hence my comment. I consider a $75 cab (plus shipping) to be something I am comfortable buying in quantity and opening fairly regularly. Once it gets to the $100 range, that’s a very different realm IMO.
No one is a fan of cost increases but they were $85 for a long time. I doubt any of us pay the same for anything we were purchasing 5 years ago. Every business has had to absorb higher costs to produce their products. Labor, insurance, storage, barrels, etc I imagine went up more than the $10 per bottle increase covered.
I think we’re all sensitive when a wine rises sharply in cost based on a big score or WOTY from WS but everyone has to raise prices at some point for it to make business sense to produce what you’re selling. Their vineyard is in a prime spot in St Helena next to Crane, Las Piedras, etc. I can imagine the demand for their fruit made it a pretty easy decision instead of raising prices to well over $100 to keep up with market prices.
Hi Fred - I have a pretty good understanding of economics, and agree that prices inevitably rise. I am not one to generally complain about wine prices. I was simply lamenting that the cost of the wine had gotten to the point (in an 8 year period, not 15, for me) where I had to view it in terms of other similarly priced ($100) wines and it became less of an automatic buy. YMMV
Sherri- understood and I have the same issue with many Napa wine these days when you compare to what you can get in other regions. I have to think at some point consolidation or reckoning will eventually happen.