My wine buddies and I cut our teeth 1994-1998 (meaning vintages 1991-1995) on new release Napa cabs. Which one hits you the hardest with fruit and tannin? (this was back when Parker started giving 100 points but wineries weren’t quite spoofilating yet). This taught me to love drinking way too young cabernets as long as they weren’t closed. Then Burgundy taught me what a waste of a wine it is drinking something not at its peak. Then tonight I had the following wine and it is the best of both worlds, a new release Cabernet that might age very well but seems fully expressed, savory, and secondary without sacrificing fruit or freshness:
2010 Agharta 100 percent Cabernet Sauvignon Mountain Terraces Vineyard Sonoma County
It says hello to – not hits – the palate like a sufficiently age-softened syrah or Burgundy. You think it will then show hints of underripe and vegetal since it is so open and friendly, but it doesn’t (I am finding out that, contrary to what I have read, even Pax’s older wines are anti-spoof for my palate, and I love the five-years-in-barrel Agharta wines except for the Exhibits).
I’m starting to like Pax Mahle’s wines, old and new, a lot. The older Paxes to me seem pure and fresh, not what I have read. The Wind Gaps can lack complexity but then they lead me into varieties and a style I might otherwise not have tried, Trousseau Gris the leading example, so I tune in easily to simiarly styled wines like the Harrington Grenache I had Sunday (which actually got kind of forbidding for a moment, really big and maybe needs age…then in the next sip, maybe not). If I were to serve a cabernet this week it would be this one. (Even a well aged Cabernet to me seems more appropriate for beef than turkey; this has a more feminine flavor set than that; think elegant syrah or elegant grenache).