Last night, to celebrate my birthday I took a bottle of '09 Luminous Hills Lux to one of my local haunts where I paired it with prime rib from the bar menu. Thank you to Chris and Byron for delivering this as a birthday gift and for making it.
This wine, when first opened, was all about sour cherries and not very pretty. But after an hour of air in a decanter and some warming up from car temperature where it had been for a day or so, it blossomed.
Showing none of the clumsiness of its less-expensive sibling, the “Estate Grown” wine and some of the other early '09s I’ve tasted, it has expressive aromas and flavors of dark cherry, crushed blackberries and a little bit of roasted meat with maybe a hint of Provencal herb. It’s 50% whole cluster but there’s no green at all and the tannins are quite refined, but apparent enough that it stood up well to the beef - a match I typically wouldn’t make.
This is a testament to Byron’s skills as a winemaker, his slightly cool site outside McMinnville, and some really judicious selection of the lots to go into the bottling. Highly recommended.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}