2006 Sawtooth Skyline Red Wine

So tonight I've decided to open up a bottle of wine that I bought about a year ago at a KOA campground in Twin Falls, Idaho of all places!  In my cross country drive, I decided to stop and camp at this KOA, and it was a real first class operation, you could buy firewood and they'd deliver it to your site, and the camp store had a lot of grocery items and a selection of local wines.  I picked up a bottle of the 2006 Sawtooth Skyline Red Wine to have with my dinner cooked out in the moonlight and decided I liked it so much I bought another bottle the next morning to bring back.  The wine is from the Snake River Valley, a still developing wine region that has a lot of hidden gems I've discovered.  This particular wine is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon (62%), Syrah (29%), Merlot (8%) and Cabernet Franc (1%).

The wine itself is a nice ruby color in the glass and the nose has some sweet, tangy notes, along with some leather, smoke and green herb aromas.  The taste is modestly fruit forward, with some flavors of ripe plum and blueberry that transitions to some smoky, woody flavors midpalate.  The finish is very dry, with some flavors of limestone as the rather brusque tannins leave it a bit short.

Overall, I would rate this wine a solid 8, as it's a very pleasant drinking wine from an unexpected place, and it was a good value at only $13 (even at a campground store that likely has higher markups!).  Tonight I paired this wine with a nice northwest dinner of cedar planked salmon, whole grain shells with four-cheese sauce and some haricots verts almandine.  The smoky notes in the wine along with the acid and fruit played really nicely against the smoky richness of the salmon, so yummy!