Happy Cellar Saturday! It's the first Saturday of the month, that magical day when I raid the cellar to open a bottle that's at least a decade in the making. So tonight I've decided that since I'm in the mood for Merlot, why not open a bottle from a solid Merlot Maker, Otis Kenyon. I have other reasons for this choice as since it's supposed to get down near 50 degrees tonight, I also plan to have a fire on the patio, which makes sense given the history of Otis Kenyon. According to the story I was told in Walla Walla last spring, the Otis Kenyon family patriarch moved to Milton-Freewater to establish his dental practice in the early 1900s. With a struggling practice, a new dentist moved into town, and somehow James Otis Kenyon decided to burn the competitors office to the ground, resulting in his providing excellent dental care to the guests and guards at a local prison. So today, as a nod to that story the labels of Otis Kenyon wines contain his silhouette are burned along the edges. The 2008 Otis Kenyon Walla Walla Merlot is 100% Merlot from the Seven Hills and Pepper Bridge Vineyards. So let's get to the wine!
The wine is a lovely, deep ruby color in the glass. The nose is chock full of leather, cherry, raspberry and fig with an overlay of floral and juniper notes. The taste is a perfect balance of old world and new world styling, with a rush of ripe fruit, blueberry, cherry and plum that transitions nicely to some wonderful mineral notes of limestone and basalt midpalate, a marriage of fruit and funk. The tannins are quite subdued at this point, but still well integrated to provide nice structure to the long, very dry finish, that treats you to a reprise of some floral and cardamom notes right at the end.
Overall, I would rate this wine a solid 9, it's a wonderfully structured Merlot that I could easily sip by itself on the patio, or enjoy with a broad range of dishes, from steaks to barbecue to tacos. Tonight I am enjoying this wine with a classic Northwest pairing, cedar planked steelhead along with potato puree with chives and steamed sugar snap peas, in a perfect evening for a dinner on the patio. Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment