I asked my wife to grab a mystery wine for dinner.
It had a very woody nose, a little smokey-ness, faintly herbal sensation…but no specific herb. (Perhaps like walking into your herb garden and maybe sage pops into your head one minute, and then something else another.) Mature fruit, possibly some very very low level cantaloupe. It also had some scent like when you weed whack already dry grass in the field - a little earth, a little faint grass, but not prominent like younger SB’s.
No citrus.
It had a higher acid sensation than I would have expected, with my brain finally being able to pin down as SB when it hit my middle and back palate. Medium term time on the finish, and inviting for another sip.
No madeira or sherry sensation. I would drink it again on purpose.
I guessed (only because I know we keep that wine sitting around) a 1999 Spottswoode SB and it turned out to be the '92.
It would have been a prefect “ringer” wine for a group tasting. If not for the finish, could have been mistaken for an older chard.
For desert, we had a toasty coconut sorbet and the sorbet really “infected” my taste mechanism for the next sip of the wine. It made for a very fun chat about smell and taste meshing with wines serendipitously!
It doesn’t show up on Wine Searcher, but if you stumble across one somewhere, I’d say it made a good impression in the context of dinner.