Wine: '99 bottles taste mighty fine

By Tom Bender

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One of the most popular events I staged while manager of the Columbia City Hotel was the Ten Years After cabernet sauvignon tasting.

I would assemble eight to 10 decade-old bottles from the restaurant cellar, blind taste them with 20 others and pick the favorites.

I started the tradition at O'Brien's last week with 10 California cabernets from 1999. Friday's tasting included a number of heavy hitters, with original retail prices from $50 to $150. The surprise winner was a bottle of cabernet from Rodney Strong's Adlher Vineyards bottling. The bottle, $20 when first released, was brought in by a taster. It edged out the 1999 Silver Oak Napa ($90), which garnered five votes. Other wines to pick up a vote as top wine included the Chateau Montelena Estate ($90), Stags Leap Cask 23 ($150), Quintessa ($150), Frogs Leap Rutherford ($50), and Cosentino Meritage ($50).

Overall, the wines showed well and many still had some life to them, allowing for additional cellar time. Several were even better after airing for a short time. It was a powerful vintage and a number of the wines still displayed heavy tannins in their finish.

Favorites, including the Rodney Strong, Silver Oak and Stags Leap had plenty of fruit and berry spice in the aromas and complex flavors to follow. Silver Oak's use of exclusively American oak did not stand out, allowing for expansive array of berry and fruit notes.

The other three wines were Gallo Estate, Rombauer Diamond and J Lohr Hillside. The Gallo entry hung in there but suffered from a high amount of sediment.

If you have some 10-year-old cabernets, I would recommend breaking them out and enjoying them.

Wine picks are from Tom Bender, wine instructor at Columbia College and wine steward for O'Brien's Market, 4120 Dale Road, Modesto, 545-8100. E-mail him at wineguy@goldrush.com or tom@obriensmarket.com.