Wine 1

No doubt, this was not a bad wine before I allowed it to sit for ten years in my closet. It is one of the more likely candidates to be acceptable, given that it is a red wine and that it is a Merlot, a wine which can take a little age without becoming outright nasty.

My luck has held! No mishap occurred upon opening the bottle. The cork seems unharmed. I have chosen for the evening to use a juice glass from a set which came from boxed soap flakes, free giveaways from the vaunted 1960s. We believe the brand of soap to have been either Duz or Zud. This set was assembled by my direct family during the period, and their prodigious soap consumption is the reason for my having quite a collection of these glasses. I find they work very well as taster glasses, and that they allow the wine to breathe nicely.

This wine, the label tells me, is the result of the tiny viticultural region called the Escondido Valley. The charming story tells of Spanish explorers looking desperately for gold, secreted, or “Escondido,” in the region. The Escondido Valley lies in Pecos County, Texas, the seat of which is Fort Stockton. The area is located on the western edge of the state, at the shoulder of the arm of which El Paso is the thumb. The region, called an American Viticultural Area, is 32.000 acres, which sounds like a lot until you convert it into just over 50 square miles. It lies just East of Fort Stockton, near I-10.

The literature warns charmingly of flavors of oak and raspberry, pretty usual suggestions of what one should try to taste.

The first thing I notice about this wine is that it is absolutely the thinnest bodied I've ever tried. Perhaps when it was younger, it would have coated the walls of my glass, but now it falls away more readily than unferminted grape juice. Is this a bad thing? Certainly not, especially in a wine more than a decade old! Don't forget, this was probably intended to be table wine, consumed within its first five years.

This Merlot has a strong nose and, unlike so many table wines, actually delivers on the promise of raspberry tones. I can smell the alcohol, meaning the wine is beginning to break down, but enrobing that aroma in velvet is a strong essence of cherry. The wine actually has a wonderfully complex nose, with hints of the ferrous earth and dust. Beyond the sharpness of the grape it smells homey, like a west Texas bunkhouse. That cherry flavor, I have to say, is really very strong and pleasant. It smells, I should add, like cherries themselves, not like cherry flavoring or that godawful Maraschino stuff. It doesn't smell like sugar, but like ripe, sour fruit.

As it warms in my hand, it develops a little more viscosity, but really, it is a very thin wine.

After that lovely aroma, drinking it seems akin to tempting fate. The first flavor, unmistakably, is tannin. Then, that cherry comes up very brightly and leaves a very pleasant finish. I don't know if it's quite Oak. I think it's more like oak leaves or the aforementioned and omnipresent dust of the West Texas plains. It has a dry but quick finish due in no small part, I'm sure, to that very think body. This is, overall, a very pleasant wine to drink.

The reason I purchased this wine so many years ago was simply that I thought the label looked nice, and I was drinking a lot of Merlot at the time. I seem to recall this wine having been placed in a basket display at the liquor store up the hill from my old house. I think it wasn't long after that I switched over to whites for quite some time, and never came back to this particular bottle. I think it has aged well, all things considered.


Next week: Horror!