Saturday November 20th, 2010
11am - until the wine runs out!
Perhaps a once in a lifetime tasting! Wine was sourced directly from the private cellar of Martha's Vineyard owner Barney Rhodes!
Cult wines come and go, and that means that the extravagantly expensive wine you saved up for won't be worth as much as you hoped in a decade or two. But isn't that the definition of a cult wine? I mean Russ Meyers movies are cultish now, but twenty years ago, they were considered trash and perhaps twenty years hence, they won't be considered so great (although I still think Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! are as good as movies need to be). Real cult objects are those that aren't valued as much as they should be, until time's light shines more radiantly upon them and the world realizes what fools they've been to overlook them.
Today's cult wines are just plain expensive. I doubt that they will accrue in value but since I don't collect them, that's someone else's problem. Meanwhile, yesterday's cult wines were actually affordable, at least once upon a time. And tip top of the cult list a few decades ago was Heitz's Martha's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. Perhaps it won't surprise anyone that I was never enamored of the wine; the minty eucalypt character was not only too much for me, in certain years, like 1976 (a drought year) it was fairly close to disgusting. But that's me.
It's not that I didn't like Heitz, but what I loved about Heitz was the Bella Oaks Vineyard: no disgusting minty eucalyptus, just pure, delightful fruit with a background of dustiness and spice. In 1976, for instance, it was gorgeous. And for some strange reason (wine sometimes goes like this), the 1986 and the 1996 echoed that lovely character in Bella Oaks.
Indeed, I have consistently enthused over those wines as much as anything the winery ever made, including the much vaunted and mythical 1974 Martha's Vineyard. I'm old, you see, so I drank my fill of it, and frankly, it wasn't that good. Heck the 1975 was better than the 1974. And Bella Oaks? I'm just saying: better, better-balanced, perhaps even longer-lived, but worth every penny and somebody's cult wine. Maybe just mine, maybe somebody's cult wine today or tomorrow. Not as buxom as a Russ Meyer's starlet, and not at all trashy, but still worth re-visiting over and over again.
Happy Tasting and we'll see you Saturday!
Cheers,
Doug Frost MS MW
Master Sommelier & Master of Wine
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