Penny Lane – Cabernet Sauvignon

Date: 05DEC07

Name: Penny Lane – Cabernet Sauvignon

Vintage: 2004

Copy: The PENNY LANE experience…Tie Dye Cabernet is big and bold, with luscious fruit, spice and a lasting finish of peace and love.

Price: $10

Appearance: A little rosier than the others, a little pinker. The penumbra of color in this Penny Lane cabernet is a bit larger than what I’ve seen so far. This is likely an artifact of my unlearned method of gauging such things.

Nose: There’s a rich nose, an aroma that I want to call tannin-like, though I don’t know why. It evokes concentrated grape juice, with a little of the same smell that Il Bastardo has, though not as strong. It’s a smoother nose, more refined perhaps. Very pleasant and compelling. Here I wish I had the vocabulary to communicate the complex interplay of odors this wine has; alas, each component escapes their telling in this story. I’ll know you soon enough!

Taste: Pleasant. Not too dry, fruity, even bordering on a grape juice-like taste, but not nearly as sweet. The finish has a taste that reminds me of the flavors your mouth might register about ten minutes after finishing a grape-flavored candy. After typing that sentence it’s clear that the finish, that lingering aftertaste, is sweeter than the initial moments after quaffing a mouthful. Like the Cheshire Cat leaving last a smile, this Penny Lane leaves a sweet aftertaste that draws one back for another glass.

Tellings: Penny Lane may be an eclectic name for a wine, but it’s the perfect name for my daughter. Named after both my mother, Penny Leigh, and the eponymous Beatles song, Penny Laine tasted the wine named after herself. Don’t get into an uproar…less than a half a thimble passed her lips and she reacted exactly as I suspected she would: a retching “how could you drink this crap”-look overtook her and the “Daddy, can I have a drink?” problem has been staved off for at least a year or so.

True to the Tie Dye copy this bottle, and the Penny Lane merlot waiting its turn, are brightly colored, evocative of Haight-Ashbury, and jumped out from all the other me-too bottles at my local winery (read: HEB supermarket). Warm splashes of color on the top of the lable, cool blues and whites on the bottom, and bifurcated by a bright-yellow strip with black print giving the name Penny Lane. The bottle itself appears to be of a greenish hue; I have not noticed this in the other bottles.

I have also decided that the best time to write a Critique about a wine is after – or while – drinking the first glass. My little bit of reading – cheating! – helped me to learn that a bottle of wine keeps for only a few days, after which oxygen degrades the flavor. True to form the Il Bastardo wine did change from the first few drinks to the last. So, this Critique follows on the heels of the last one.