(Re-Tasted March 2010) ... I, in general, find winemakers to be a conservative lot when discussing the longevity potential of their wines. I remember Jean-Pierre Colas telling us that he expected this to be a 2-year lived wine and that was about it. The pedigree of the wine should have deemed it to last longer: 2005 was a good growing season and an experienced winemaker - should be enough to gain at least another year or two ... and it was - it was the 5 years that killed it.
Recently I was asked to try the 2007 version of the Reserve Syrah being released by Peninsula Ridge, and that reminded me that I still had a bottle of the 2005 edition (though not the reserve). So tonight I cracked it open to give it a go, wanting to see if Jean-Pierre was wrong in his assessment. The last time I tried this wine was back in January of 2008, it took some time to open, and needed to be decanted, and it finally did revealing a nice raspberry earthiness. Today I was not that lucky. The nose started out with lots of green pepper with a faint flutter of raspberry in the background and then things turned south quickly, the smell became very paint thinner-like. Remembering the need to decant I did ... though it did little to help the wine, it brought out a little more of the fruit and dulled the paint thinner aspect, but it still was hard on the palate and the pleasure of the fruit was short-lived itself. This wine needed a lot of work to make it drinkable (15 minutes of shaking and stirring the decanter) and I am not sure most people would have worked this hard to try and get a drinkable wine out of it. In the end I came to the conclusion that it was not a horrible wine, it just wasn't very good anymore. If this were the last bottle in my house and the stores were all closed I could have drunk this wine, but since I have other stuff to chose from it did not make the cut. Turns out Jean-Pierre was right, though he was off by at least a year.
I moved on to another wine.
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