This was a killer dinner. Fu’s notes are spot on, but the quality across the board was really high, except the HB 
. The three 78s from Kent’s cellar all showed very young and could easily go 10 more years. Both BV GDLs were great.
Great notes on great wines, Charlie…brought back fond memories of the Duckhorn Merlot and the 2 BV Georges…
The Golden Age lasted until around 1996.
Those old BV PRs are a treat.
On the plus side, now that the Eisele Vyd. is in the hands of Chateau Latour, the wines from there are highly informed by that previous Napa era. Unfortunately for me, that’s a lot of money to pay for wines that may not peak til I’m in my 80s or 90s.
Nice notes! I had the 78 Phelps Eisile nealy 20 years ago and it was the best California wine I’ve ever had (and remains so today) - glad to see it’s still going strong!!
Yes -absolutely.
One thing of interest to me. One often sees tasting notes of old BV Reserves (and I have tasted a bunch). But, one sees less often notes on the other great Cab of what I might call the pre-modern era - Inglenook Cask. I had a decent amount of Inglenook Cask from the early seventies (really past the prime of the making of those wines) but have not seen or read much about old Inglenook Cask in modern days. Was less of it made? Is it because quality went down earlier than for BV Reserve. Or, is it just because so many grew up seeing Inglenook as a jug wine and they cannot really believe that this was once a great wine.
Inglenook got bought out long before BV and was made into a commercial brand. Without access to their vineyards, they made a lot of dreck in the 70’s and 80’s. I still have a couple of Cask bottles including a Pinot I believe.
I used to crawl on my hands and knees in the mom & pop shops out on the avenues of SF in search of the older Inglenook Cask wines in the early eighties. Those were some great wine experiences.