This West Coast red wine blend was not a favorite of this third coast girl. If you don’t know what that means – don’t worry.
This wine is very sweet and honestly is a wine that truly needs food with it. It’s not a sipping wine or a replacement for your gin and juice.
At first taste it was acrid with a bit of a petroleum flavor and then the sweet sugar kicked in, with some welches grape with blackberries berries.
Don’t let the deep claret color of this wine fool you, while it might not have the depth the color implies, it’s still complex.
We paired this with comfort food – sausage, red beans and rice. Now we used andouille sausage for more of the cajun style I remember from growing up. The wine brought out the spice of the sausage.
Final Thoughts
While my husband said the wine has an anise (licorice) taste after it breathes reminiscent of a good Bordeaux – I think the wine is too young and too thin for that comparison. It does get earthier as it breathes.
My recommendation would be to decant the wine if you don’t want the bottle on the table – or open it early and let it really breath. Personally, we’ll cellar the other two bottles as they should age well. Despite Snoop Dogg having been on the Death Row Records label – I’ll gift his Cali Red before I’d gift this one. Unless you just know they’ll appreciate the label or sweet wine.
