Menage a Trois Cabernet Sauvignon (“vintage” unknown)
Served by friends at a graduation party. Pleasant fruity nose. On the palate unidentifiable red fruit with large dollops of residual sugar. Tastes okay in a sweet sort of bland fashion, and would have to be considered a decent fruity beverage - but it’s hard for me to call it wine.
2012 Kendall Jackson “Grand Reserve” Cabernet Sauvignon (Alexander Valley)
The Menage a Trois was too inconsequential to care about; this was an offense to winemaking. My buddy is a pretty good winehunter (apologies, Victor) and he was proud of picking up this nominally $30 wine on clearance for $7 a bottle. And no, it wasn’t marked down because it was cooked or destroyed - I’m pretty certain what was in the bottle was what was intended. I wasn’t even concerned that it was Kendall Jackson. After all, big producers like Gallo and Mondavi and such have actually put out some pretty decent wines in their time, especially if you move up a bit in the price range. Anyway, in this case even $7 was too much.
The biggest problem is that if you had handed me the wind blind it would have gone like this: no questions, no doubts, just “Boom! Nailed it. Syrah. 2012 or 2013 vintage. Producer with pretensions to quality from a too-warm Southern California location like Agua Dulce or Temecula. Mic drop.” At least to a large extent it was varietally correct - for the wrong grape. If I hadn’t seen the bottle being opened and poured I’d have thought a joke was being played on me. It smelled like Syrah, the fruit tasted like Syrah, there was black pepper, even a trace of meatiness. There was zero trace of Cabernet Sauvignon to be found. Add to it the sins of over-extraction and over-oaking (hence the “pretensions to quality” statement) and it wasn’t even good Syrah. We gave it plenty of air and several hours and it just didn’t change or improve.
I’ve had plenty of “Pinot Noir as Syrah,” but never a “Cabernet Sauvignon as Syrah”. Avoid at all costs.
I’ve had a number. Indeed, in a brown-bag group of mine, it’s amazing how often no one guesses cab for California cabs. Research has shown that a lot of consumers don’t like olive and green pepper notes, so the goal in many cases is to purge all cabernet character. And, when ripe enough, all varieties kind of converge. Add in some oak, and you have generic what-ever red.
Sounds to me like an oak adjunct…that “savoury” quality is easily imparted by many propriety oak adjunct blends…chips, cubes, dust, stave inserts, whatever…I get it all the time in tank-produced bulk wines I come across. Though, this may have just been cubes added to barrels or a stave insert system but, for sub-$20 north coast Cabernet’s in CA, the days of wine going through barrels are pretty much over for any producer making over 10,000 cases.
Cameron, why would “oak adjuncts” impart a different flavor than a wine aged in an oak barrel? Is it merely because inferior oak is used, that it hasn’t been appropriately aged/toasted or is there some other reason?
My experience is with higher-end wines — often $75+ ones – where they’re using barrels. I’m pretty sure the lack of cab character in those is a function of the ripeness. Just as very old wines all converge into a generic oldness, all raisins kind of taste alike. (I guess the same thing could be said of very underripe fruit, as well!)
Well, their are huge differences among oak barrels to begin with…the cabs my team produces (vs. buy in bulk) usually have oak barrels from 4+ coopers with oak from various forests. Toast levels of various bottles will alter flavor profiles imparted to the fruit as well. But you knew that.
When it comes to adjuncts, their combinations of different oaks and toast levels are endless. That said, there are standard or proprietary oak blends that producers will develop with a company like Stavin to give a consistent profile. I’ve seen this particular “savory” profile a million times and its a blend from Stavins PhD’s and usually deployed as cubes. The problem is that it is usually deployed on over-cropped fruit and/or rather carelessly fermented wines and basically takes over…you’ll get good color (oak chips in fermenter good to bind color but also to bind and remove pyrazine), a note of fruit but then its savory all the way. Again, may or may not be whats happening here but I run into it more often than not now with sub-$20 North Coast Cabs.
In actuality, these adjuncts can be deployed in a much more subtle fashion as I have seen a countless times in Australia - they’re to the point where its hard to tell but for the tell-tale unresolved mid-palate and lean finish. I can’t say the same for the US - you can tell every time if you know what you’re looking for. We’re getting a bit better at it, however. This is a bit of conjecture/theory, but I think that US wineries were not, in general, set up to use adjuncts. Part of the problem is that oak adjuncts, like bacteria, “bloom” in the wine. if you don’t know how to use them, as soon as you think the wine is done, you’ve gone to far and you can’t filter oak out. I can’t tell you how many 2009 Napa Cab’s I tasted (usually grower lots from excess fruit) that smelled like campfire pit and tasted like ashtrays from over-deployed adjuncts. Was a real tragedy. Don’t see that anymore thankfully.
John, my experience has been identical to yours. In fact, tasting notes of cassis, blackberry/blueberry and licorice has become code for these anywhere/anything kinds of wine. There are some slight textural differences that may help ID a variety when tasting blind, but at a certain point many varieties merge to a generic sameness when ripe enough.
Cameron, thanks for the great information on adjuncts. I’m glad my petulant little rant got turned into something genuinely educational and of value for the board. Certainly your line about “unresolved mid-palate and lean finish” helps to illustrate why judicious use of oak is about much more than adding oak flavor to a wine.
No worries Wade…nothing petulant about it. Granted you only paid $7 for that wine but its supposed to retail for $18 so to have an $18 wine show like that is, well, worthy of disappointment. Not having tasted the wine myself I feel I should add that I have solid respect for the overall Jackson Family portfolio when you get up over $20/bottle and only say above $20 because i haven’t tasted the sub-$20 wines in a decade or more.
The unresolved mid-palate is also part of being micro-ox’d in tank and why oak adjuncts will never replace good barrels. To date no one has been able to replicate the barrel effect very well AFAIK.