Extraordinary

This wine is one that you should try before you die.

This is what Dave Zack said on cellar tracker. The wine needs to be mature and ready to deliver its rich and sumptuous character. We sipped ours on Boxing Day, a glass of which could be savoured for an hour.

This is a link:
http://www.cellartracker.com/notes.asp?iWine=1334492.

Dave, clearly loved this wine, his description of the wine is very flattering indeed, but not untrue. The wine is as a supercharged Rhone blend, and when aged for sufficient time, very much like a velvety Penfolds bin 389, some 30 years ago, structure and concentration, very very similar.

I have not sampled a Bin 389 recently. For producers of this style, this Fess Parker effort is a stunning cuvee' 5068 cases made they say. I think the Santa Barbara climate must have been absolutely perfect in the vineyards in 2009 to produce a wine of this character. The producer of this style knows how to do it very well.

Extra extraordinary wine. Here is a pic of the label.



About $28 or so (£19 + sterling), so priced correctly for its followers. For QPR, I'd say that the Fess Parker wine wins hands down versus Bin 389.

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Duncan

I've been trawling the web, for something big, bold and beautiful from Sonoma, Santa Barabara, Napa and looking at Majestic prices, which have become astronomical for these hand crafted Californian wines, I think you have to be at the cellar door, or in the locality to get these sort of wines at the price I quoted above.

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Duncan