2018 Prisoner Wine Company The Prisoner Cabernet Sauvignon - USA, California, Napa Valley (2/7/2023)
Not much to say. In a hotel room in Chicago and this was what was available in minibar. It follows the playbook of a riper Napa - sweetness, not a lot of fruit, tobacco, leather, tertiaries, broody and full of Wall street steakhouse-investment-fund-manager-bro-vibes, but at least oak is pretty well integrated and not in your face. Be easy to make fun of this from a subtler, win nerd point of view, but right at this moment, it's pairing well with the room service filet mignon and going down pretty easy. But yeah, sweet and big. And sometimes that's OK. (88 points)
Thanks for posting a TN on a wine that so many would pan. Iāve never had a Prisoner, but appreciate your forthright and honest assessment of this wine. I love those wines that fit the time and place and, as you say, thatās sometimes enough!
I was going to put this in āwhat bottle did you openā thread but surprisingly I found this.
Long story how I ended up with this, .375 2108 prisoner cab but here goes; this is not made in a style I prefer, but in total honesty itās not anywhere close to as bad as I feared. Itās big for sure but I donāt get any mega-purple notes, or that astringent oak chip flavor, or really over the top sweetness. Iād never go buy it but paired with a very aggressively season smoked pork shoulder (i figured whatever I drank last night was gonna get clobbered anyway) it did the job.
If you nailed me down on a number maybe 85-86? Second glass was a little better.
A friend invited me over for grilled filets last night. Normally I provide the wine, but he said he was going to open a bottle of The Prisoner ā¦ from 2012. I told him Iād be curious, but I wouldnāt that want that to be my sole libation and that I would bring something.
Well, I think the note below nailed it: ā[I]tās not anywhere close to as bad as I feared.ā
There was a reasonable amount of sediment. The 15.2% stuck out a bit at first, but I didnāt notice it after a while. The fruit flavor wasnāt raisiny or anything. Itās mostly zin, and there was the nice mellow zin berries you expect at 13 years. Any tannin there is fully resolved, but it wasnāt flabby. (No acid to speak of.)
So I, too, would come in around 85 points. Maybe a bit less. It is very generic.
Would I buy it? Never. But I wasnāt in the mood to drink a lot, so two modest glasses with the beef was fine and I never opened another bottle.
That probably meant a lot to your friend, who was opening their āspecialā bottle for you. Sometimes keeping someone happy is more important than toughing it out through a mediocre bottle.
I will be happy to be corrected on this, but iirc the earlier releases of Prisoner had a decent chunk of Evangelho vineyard fruit in them, as well as some other decent sites. Stopped selling to them as they called up their production. So all in all closer to a good āfield blendā than you would have expected.
Yep, the earlier vintages of The Prisoner were a COMPLETELY different animal. 2004 - 2008āish were pretty good wines that actually had some complexity!
Thatās a kind thought. But since Iād indicated to him hours before that I considered this pretty low-brow stuff ā and because weāre old friends and he eats crappy packaged food and understands that I donāt ā there was no need to humor him.
He recently invited me to a Rombauer tasting hosted by a distributor in a restaurant. I told him that was a definite pass.
This is the same friend Iāve mentioned before here who bought a case of Apothic Inferno but loves Sancerre and dry riesling. Go figure. He also appreciates good reds, and by tradition, I bring those, and he buys the filets.
