I served this with a beef, barley, and mushroom stew for which it made a very nice match. It's not a particularly complex wine, which meant it didn't fight with the complexly flavored stew.
At age 10, it's thrown a lot of flighty, light sediment, which meant that decanting was a royal pain in the proverbial beast of burden. I ended up having to decant the bulk of it through an unbleached coffee filter, which is always a last resort. (I decanted it about 75 minutes before service.)
Despite the considerable sediment it's thrown, the wine remains an incredibly deep and opaque purple-black with no signs of red even at the very edge of the rim. The amount of anthocyanidins in this wine must be off the chart.
On the palate, this is a big, high alcohol, high extract wine that has an almost port-like mouth feel. Blackberry and blueberry.
Grade: B/B+
