Wine Wednesday: Coppola's Director's Cut Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon 2018

 The first thing you'll notice about this wine is the label, which wraps around the bottle like a strip of film. It's clever and eye-catching and I'll admit I spent way too much time wondering it they made a special machine to apply the labels, or whether they were all put on by hand. Either way it seems like a ton of work for a mid-tier wine. But, then again, I'm equally unimpressed by the current trend of producing special edition books, so perhaps that's just me.

Don't get me wrong. I think sprayed edges and metallic accents, etc, are gorgeous, and I love me some gorgeous covers, but at the end of the day the words on the page and the wine inside the bottle are what I'm most interested in.  

(That's my grandson's hand in the picture, btw. He's attempting to remove the bottle. Because, as you can see, I'd plunked it down in the middle of his Legos.)

Anyway...this was a 2018 vintage from Sonoma County. 2017 and 2018 were two of the worst fire seasons in recent California history. I was living just outside Napa at that time and I swear I could smell a very familiar smokiness as soon as I opened this bottle. 

I don't think it's smoke taint, which is a thing that apparently makes wine undrinkable, because this was a very good wine--complex and layered with good legs and soft tannins--but it's smoky, for sure. 

I suspect it's a matter of terroir because I taste ash (call it minerality, if you like) and wild fennel and maybe some hints of lavender and sage and I can remember how the scent of cold ashes lingered everywhere. And how, after the fires of 2017 the bare, burned hillsides turned green with renewed life in the Spring of 2018...only to burn again the following Fall.  

It's an opulent wine, but not jammy at all. It's dry and a tad acerbic with notes of cocoa and cassis. My mother used to make a dish of Cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice that she served with a flaming, tart cherry and brandy sauce. It was the seventies, what can I say? This wine would've paired perfectly with that. Or with a dark chocolate dessert. Mousse, perhaps. Or, dare I say it?  S'mores. 

It's true, but yeah...it's probably still too soon for that.