Last night with a a lovely, flavorful prime NY strip steak, we enjoyed a tasty 1973 Simi Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon - fill a half inch down from the cork, cork colored a jagged 3/4 inch; good complex dark currant and cherry fruit, with barely adequate acidity and completely resolved tannins; no herbal notes at all, they had changed to add complexity; with a long, complex, secondary dark currant fruit finish. I think this is from Zelma Long"s tenure at Simi.
I think Long was with Mondavi then. The Simi family descendants sold the winery around that time but Simi didn’t officially “go corporate” until around 1980 about the time Zelma came along and she left when Constellation bought them, I think. Anyway, those old Cabs had lots of acids and tannins and (relatively) not much alcohol. Few years ago I had a '88 Dry Creek Vyds Zin with 12-point-something alcohol. Imagine that! What I remember from that wine is that it tasted kinda dusty and dark.
Didn’t Maryann Graf start at Simi in 1973? This stuff hurts my head