TN St. Francis 2002 Old Vines Zinfandel

Often I'll uncork a wine to a nice nose which doesn't seem to last the whole glbutt, but this one certainly did. Katie made some stir-fried beef strips with vegetables, coconut milk, and thai curry, which we had over a Lundberg mix of gourmet rices (an excellent rice, btw), so I selected a zinfandel. Of this vintage I had the 2002 and the 2003, so I picked the one that had the most benefit of my erzats cellar.

There was a little bit of sediment, so I decanted the bottle, pouring half into a split for later on, recorking it per the paperclip technique, and I started with a few sips from the bottom (which had the sediment; I didn't bother to filter it out but at least I separated it from the bulk of the wine). It was spicy, and even the little bit in the glbutt developed a wonderful nose. When dinner was served, I had a glbutt from the rest of the bottle, and there wsan't much (if any) difference between the decanted wine and the undecanted sips. The spiciness of the wine went well with the thai spices, the nose was heavenly, and on the palate it was full bodied. Not too strong on the tannins at all, very well balanced. I'm looking forward to the other split, and to the 2003.

I had the rest of the first split today with the leftovers (which I served over wagon wheel pasta) and it was equally wonderful, though the nose was not quite as strong. I wonder if that may be from pumping down the split with a VacUVin.

This wine was sealed with a synthetic cork, which is harder to reuse in a split, so I'm saving cork corks for this purpose.

On the modified Parker scale, from 1 to 100 (skipping the range from 50-70 and allowing double points in the range of 85-95) I'd rate it between 92.4497 and 92.4498. It would be 96.1894 for the nose alone.

Jose -- The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music. for Email, make the obvious change in the address.