This was…just ok. Dark, cloudy/murky brown in color and typical sweet/LH notes on the nose. In the mouth it’s fine…but not exciting. Plenty of sugary fruit left, but its one-note, and kinda boring.
For whatever reason, I’ve never had much luck with older David Bruce wines. Zins, PS, etc. Many of them have actually been completely shot/undrinkable, so this was better than most…but still pretty forgettable.
Always fun to open an older bottle like this…but onto the next one 
They have been hit and miss with me also. I think the grapes from this came from the Madron˜a vineyard, still a good source for Mountain Zin in my opinion.
Glad its not just me, ha!
I keep trying, but my hit rate is…not great
I’ve had some extreme bottle variation. I brought a '70 PS as one of the birth year wines for a wine friend’s 40th. Weird, monolithic, no fruit, lots of ballpoint pen ink, dense. A friend had one 5 years later and said it was fantastic. Then we had one in a big older DB tasting we did (2015 or 2016) and it was just okay…but did show normal faded fruit.
I opened a '70 Carignan at the perfect occasion to share. Powerful bottle stink when I popped the cork, but that blew off very quickly and it was fantastic. WOTY for me. A bottle of this was one of a friend’s contributions to that DB tasting a couple years later. I was sort of expecting it to blow everyone away. She and her later husband had bought it at the winery on release, and stored it properly. DOA. Just completely faded, nothing of interest.
Very interesting! Cool to hear that you’ve had some amazing bottles as that makes me want to keep trying! This was the ‘best’ ive had, but a 70 LH dry zin, 71 LH zin, and 70 Petite Sirah were all literally DOA. Pitiful watery brown color and not really drinkable. Those are the breaks with aged wine…but my success rate with David Bruce has been pretty terrible, ha!
I don’t think he used sulfer regularely until the mid 70’s, maybe is part of the cause.
True. He didn’t add SO2 at all til then. Iirc, it was brett, but maybe something else, that went wrong that converted him. He modeled his early winemaking after Martin Ray, who didn’t add SO2 to his wines. In a previous thread years ago someone pointed out that he sulfured the crap out of his barrels, though.
