Hey Tinh,
Re-reading what I wrote I would also be confused lol! Well, I might as well go ahead and do a proper write up of the first wine, rather than the informal one above. I'm no wordsmith, but hopefully I can at least make it understandable this time.
2009 Liberte Cabernet Sauvignon - $7.99 on sale ($9.99 regular)
This is a neat wine bottled by Nueva Famiglia, the same guys that own Ancient Peaks. (I previously wrote Atlas Peaks, but I was being silly. They own Ancient Peaks.) The lead winemaker in the group also runs his own boutique label called Sinor-Lavallee, where he produces amazing Pinot Noirs. Needless to say, I was expecting BIG things from this wine, and it completely delivered... eventually. The full story is below, but the summary is this. GET THIS WINE and let it open! It won't taste like it needs it, but it does. The back of the label says to decant 15-30 minutes, and I completely believe it.
Now the long story....
Initial Tasting: We opened this guy up on a Friday. There was a lot of fruit on the nose. Lots of bright berry aroma and a fair bit of alcohol too. On the first sip we tasted ... Sugar. This thing was Super sweet. Rock Candy level of sweet. There was fruit there, sure, but there was also just a lot of sugar, and not a whole lot else going on. We didn't taste a ton of tannins or structure, though that might be because we were focusing solely on the sugar rush, so we figured that the sugar bomb was all this wine was going to have to offer. We poured ourselves a small glass each to have with dinner, and immediately used one of
these guys to save the wine for cooking with later (and potentially drinking while cooking!!). To re-iterate, that was Friday.
Second Tasting: Sunday we had some good news to celebrate so we opened up a very nice wine to go with a somewhat nice dinner (What can I say? I only had 1 hour's notice that we'd have something to celebrate. I made the best meal I could with what I had). We didn't drink all of the wine, so we went to get one of those rubber wine corks to pump it (see previous link) but couldn't find any. The only one we saw was keeping the Liberte "fresh". Since the Liberte had been such a disappointment, we immediately stole the rubber stopper from the Liberte and used it on the nicer bottle of wine. And merely on a whim, we decided to see what our impromptu "aging" had done to the Liberte. HO-LY SH!T!!! This stuff had completely transformed. There was structure, there was ripe fruit and blackberries, and cedar, and just a bit of spice. It was full and luscious. Now, it wasn't as nice as the wine we had just been drinking, but I had NO problems transitioning from that $45 wine to this one. I mean, you could easily tell the difference between them when tasting side-by-side, but for it's $8 price tag that $45 wine should have blown this one out of the water, and it didn't. We couldn't figure out what had happened, until we finally saw the back of the label where they specifically tell you to decant this wine for 15-30 minutes. That's right. Decant an $8 wine. No seriously. Do it!
Well I picked up a few more bottles of this today, and next time we open it, we will be following the wine-maker's instructions. I'll update this again after doing it the "right" way.
-Ben