1994 Ridge Monte Bello- USA, California, San Francisco Bay, Santa Cruz Mountains (8/22/2020)
Decanted for 45 minutes. Dark opaque garnet. Steadily building nose of cassis, cedar, acacia, red currant, fennel, saline. Layers of deeply drenching black and red currant, vibrant ripe plum, blackberry, and iodine on the smoothly-textured palate. Lovely acidity and gentle tannin leading to a long finish of anchored but ringing red fruit with hints of leather and tobacco. A wine of balanced richness. Just beautiful. (94 pts.)
We had a '94 MB along with a 1970 about 2 weeks ago. We were celebrating my wife’s birthday with several friends, so no detailed notes. Here’s my impressions, though …
The '94 was a bit overshadowed by its older sibling. It was drinking very nicely - medium to full bodied, lovely fruit - but still a bit primary. It was soft, almost lush, on the palate with just a trace of acidity and tannin evident. I’ll drink my remaining bottles over the next several years as I don’t see this becoming a 50 year wine.
Excellent. Hope the bottles show well on upcoming celebrations.
Scott,
This wine has had a mixed reception from critics and CT reviewers (though not lately) so I did not know what to expect. I was glad our experience was a good one - we really enjoyed it with grilled Spencer steaks. Hope your next showing is more favorable.
To be clear, it’s the particular wine, not the region or general vintage character.
I use the term “mood” to distinguish from “bottle variation”, as the same exact bottle could show well or less so depending where it is cycling through whatever changes are going on. This is most often a phenom in barrel and very young (usually pre-release) wines. Short, independent cycles where different bottles from the same case can be completely out of sync with each other, as opposed to long cycles where generally all bottles will shut down for the same period, for example. Anyway, Ridge knew what was going on with this wine and waited it out, and were correct, as this seems to be showing consistently well now. Not aware of any of their wines doing anything like this before or since.
Great information and new to me regarding a particular wine. Twenty-six years from the vintage would seem to be long enough to tame such moodiness, and to your point, that seems to be the case per recent tasting notes.