“A delicious and beautifully balanced wine in every way…”
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I don’t normally write a review from memory, but this wine is so impressive, it pretty much wrote itself. The occasion was a long overdue renewal of acquaintances with our friends Jim and Cheryl Brennan. The location was Mon Jin Lau, arguably the finest Asian-fusion restaurant (they call it “Nu-Asian”) in southeastern Michigan. The wine was one that we’ve had a decades-long love affair with, the perennial favorite Ridge Geyserville. I had taken a gander at the wine list before handing it off to Jim to see if anything caught his eye, and when he mentioned this, that was all any of us needed to hear.
2020 Ridge Geyserville Alexander Valley, 69% Zinfandel, 20% Carignane, 8% Petite Sirah, 2% Alicante Bouschet, 1% Mataro, 14.1% alc., $79: It’s obvious from the very first sip that this is a special wine. It’s sleek and sultry, so smooth and velvety in texture. Unmistakable Ridge in character, it delivers a cornucopia of flavors, including red and black raspberries, blueberries and lavender, at once seamless and harmonious. Deceptively well-structured for several years in the cellar, with tannins that make themselves known mainly in some earthiness on the finish, where they clamp down just a little. A delicious and beautifully balanced wine in every way; highly recommended. Find this wine
This is Ridge’s 55th consecutive vintage of Geyserville. The grapes are grown in three adjoining vineyards on a single soil type, deposited by an ancient washout of the Russian River that carried river stone and gravel. It is approximately one and- a-quarter miles long and a half-mile wide. At 460mm, rainfall during the year was below average, although with much of it falling in March and April, there was enough to sustain the vines during summer. Among Ridge’s three Zinfandel estates, Geyserville coped the best with the drought: the crop was only 20% down here. Fire broke out to the northwest in mid-August, but winds blew the smoke due south, bypassing Ridge’s vineyards. The grapes were hand-harvested at night between 21 August and 11 September. The grapes were crushed and fermentation proceeded with natural yeast. There were daily pump-overs during fermentation, after which the wine was aged for 13 months in air-dried American oak barrels, with 20% new wood.
Geyserville has been selling for around $50-55 a bottle in the Detroit market lately, so the $79 tariff at Mon Jin Lau is a very fair price. I can also attest to the fact that it pairs beautifully with the Sizzling Peppered Tuna that I ordered. Ridge Vineyards may no longer sport the easy going demeanor we remember so fondly from our past adventures, starting way back in 1997, but what they’re putting in the bottle is as good as it ever was. It just costs more than it used to, but then, what doesn’t?
Reporting from Day-twah,
Bastardo
