Wannabe Wino

The wine for the evening was the 2004 Zina Hyde Cunningham Petite Sirah. It hails from Lake County, clocks in at 14.9% alcohol by volume, and cost us $24 at the winery last March. I have another bottle of this wine hanging out in the cellar and it is going to be tough to now pop the cork on it soon, it's such a tasty wine!

I first noted the color on the wine, a deep dark inky purple, classic Petite Sirah. The nose smelled of blackfruit, gobs of blueberry, blackberry, spice, baking spice, chocolate, and anise. Roll it altogether and you'd have a pretty darn tasty pie. In the mouth, the tannins dominated. This needed air, so I quickly pulled out our decanter to give this one some help. After some time in the decanter, the flavor showed all blueberries, all the way. I even wrote down blueberries three times in my notes, and underlined it, and put exclamation points next to it. I think I wanted to remember that this one was full of blueberries. Behind the blueberries I found undertones of red berries, spice, clove, anise, chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate covered cherries.

The wine smoothed beautifully fairly quickly, however, my first tasting note for this one was "Hello tannins." So you are definitely going to want to give this one some time to air or try to save it for a few a years...I'll try, I promise. As we were drinking it, I kept thinking back to the blind tasting of Petite Sirah I hosted when it was my turn to host Wine Blogging Wednesday. This wine would have placed extremely well in the tasting in my opinion. Overall, a delicious, tannic, beast of a Petite Sirah, perfect for those who love this wild grape.