As I mentioned in an earlier thread, was gifted a bottle and figured it was not necessary to age it.
In the glass it is a super dark purple color with only the slightest lightening toward violet at the rim. Aromas are pleasing enough, with dark black and blue fruit punctuated by spice, cigar, and toasty vanilla oak. My fiance noted some cocoa, but I did not.
On the palate the wine is medium bodied with a large core of fruit supported by spicy, vanilla oak that’s just as large. It’s balanced in a manner of speaking but it is just too much. It’s sweet on the palate - and I think you know the sensation - because the wine is technically “dry”. I actually enjoyed 1 glass, while I was cooking. I had a normal pour, nothing huge. My fiance enjoyed it much more as did everyone else who knew what it was. The bottle was drained very fast, but I poured myself a few more ounces and let it sit until the end of the night when I went back to it. After having a variety of other wines with dinner, I couldn’t stomach the sweet fruit of this wine.
I think in a flight tasting, this would stick out like a sore thumb and seem fake among other wines of similar style. This is cocktail Cabernet if ever there was one.
So to me, it’s definitely not something I’d buy. For $60 I can find much better options to my palate. I suspect many people at dinner would love to buy this wine thinking it’s among the best they ever had.
To score this is impossible. To me, it’s in the low 80’s. I suspect that an average of people at the dinner, if I polled them, would put it in the mid 90’s. After all, it’s a style thing. And this is not my style.
John, thanks for being the lab rat on this one. I’ve been gifted a bottle as well and had assumed it would go right in the re-gift stash. You’ve confirmed my assumption.
Sequence of wine drinking is definitely something to remember when drinking multiple wines. I am glad you mentioned that part. I typically just drink a Caymus with a big medium rare steak with no wine before or after. I can definitely understand your response at the end of the evening after having other wines.
John – I had a very similar reaction when I brought a bottle to a brown-bag tasting a few years ago. (I don’t remember the vintage.) It was just big and generic. Since then I’ve seen posts here about Caymus going to the dark side, and those seem right.
I had an ounce or two from a plastic cup last night at a casual high school graduation / pizza party. I was thinking the wine would go well with the Costco chocolate cake.
Last Caymus I had was the 2007, which seemed to be stereotypical of a modern, innocuous spoof Cab (high quality, to be sure). Also, imo the sweetness isn’t merely an impression…I would love to see the results of an analysis for residual sugar in Caymus.
Not bad wines per se, but certainly a poster child wine for what a more AFWE palate loathes in modern Napa.
Not John or Jim, but I do not get the same impression of overt sweetness from Mondavi (as one example fitting your mass-produced criteria). KJ Chard has residual sugar yet it’s still considered “technically” to be a dry wine - why would the same not be true for certain reds?
No surprise on the Caymus, every bottle I’ve ever tasted has been ripe and syrupy. More so with the “Special Selection”. I haven’t tried one in quite a few years, and don’t plan to change that.
Alex, almost (?) every single wine has residual sugar. However, I have always used the term “dry” to in place of no perceptible residual sugar. I read the post as “it has perceptible RS.”
I had some friends and family over last night for dinner and I had open an 04 trocken riesling, a CA pinot, a Beaune 1er, and a cab dominated WA State red blend and someone brought over a 2012 Caymus. In contrast the Caymus was overwhelmingly sweet and nothing at all like I remember bottles tasting in the late 90s early 2000s when I first started paying attention to wine.
(Sigh) They we’re always that way. Up through most of the '80s, they were more “rustic” for lack of a better word. I don’t recall the last vintage Randy Dunn made, but it seems thereafter they became more and more overt and jammy. By 1994, many Napa Cabs were on that same road.
So then the question is, good thread by the way, who DOES drink this stuff? $65 is a lot of money for a novice palate to spend. And it seems that those of us who know wine better, see Caymus for what it is.