Listen, I feel that wine making is one of the more noble things a person can do with their life. So naturally, I’m biased toward winemakers. I want to love them no matter the quality of their product. Regardless of taste, it’s still wine, and therefore liquid love and happiness. So if I really don’t care for a bottle of wine, I almost feel bad knocking it. All it ever tried to do was bring a little light into the dark cavernous reaches of my heart and I shot it down, rejected it, called it fat and made it cry. Old Moon Zinfandel came to me all sparkles and sunshine and I spit it from my mouth like lukewarm seawater. For this I feel bad.
Old Moon is a Zinfandel made from vines that are 35-70 years old. I don’t know enough about wine making to know if old vines are synonymous with good wine. However, I would wager that a well placed, well tended middle aged vineyard could produce just as equally interesting wines as an ancient vineyard of similar quality. All this is a long winded way of saying, that the Zinfandel vines that Old Moon gets it’s grapes from are old… Take away from that what you will.
Here’s the deal though. This didn’t taste like the Zinfandels I love, it tasted overly fruity. The black cherry that’s mentioned on the label’s tasting notes is certainly there, but too much so. It overwhelmed the whole balance of the thing and left me kinda puckered up. I tried to get through the glass, but the berry tastes were just too much, too sweet. I wanted a Zinfandel that was big and bold and tasted like sunshine, dirt and spice. Something that’s so dry you have to drink water afterward because you’re parched. This wasn’t that… at first.
BUT WAIT! I sit here now, two days after opening this bottle and I’ve got half of it left. Arguably it should no longer be in a great state for drinking. But I figure I’m writing the review, I should have a sip to remember why I disliked it so damn much. I wrest free the cork and because I’m lazy I take a swig straight from the bottle. What the fuck? Hello spicy dryness, hello bold character, hello tannins aplenty. What happened to you Old Moon? What have you become? Did oxygen contamination fix you? Did my palate change almost overnight?
I pour some into a glass to investigate further. Not much change, I can pick up a bit more fruit if I focus hard and sniff deep, it’s so much less than before. Suddenly this wine has become – almost – hot tasting.
What does this mean? Well, I think if there’s one take away from this it’s that any review is horribly subjective. When you’re dealing with taste (I mean literally the sense, not the “there’s no accounting for…” kind) things get even more murky. In this case, I can’t even trust my own palate to tell me the same “truth” on separate days because even it seems subjective and privy to fits of change. To chop up a review of food or drink into a “This sucks. This doesn’t” dichotomy is to be disingenuous and ignorant, at best.
So buy the wine still. Buy all kinds of wine. Remember that wine loves you and it’s up to you to let it into your heart.
