Many thanks to the Cosimo crew for providing “Wine Madness” this weekend. We tasted several excellent wines, a few standouts are worth mentioning in more detail:

• Linne Calodo Rising Tides 2004 - A massive wine, nearly 16% alcohol... which normally would've made me steer way clear of this bottle, but it had tannin structure and fruit to match and was really well-balanced.

• Trimbach Reserve Personnelle Pinot Gris 1999 Alsace - Usually an inexpensive producer, you cannot go wrong with these guys (especially if you like wine that tastes like it was filtered over purified gravel).

• Stags Leap Wine Cellars Fay 1998 - The upstart CA boys that beat the French and out CA cab. on the map.  Lots of secondary aromas going on with this one now, a stark contrast to the...

• Opus One 1998 - which was full of fruit and smooth as silk... and they said `98 was a bad year...

• Lynch Bages 1988 - One of the smokiest (and enjoyable) wines I've ever tasted... somehow, it got even smokier in the glass over the span of 2 hours... not sure how that happened (maybe I should have paid more attention in Chemistry class).
  

All in all, a great night hanging out with some great folks and eating some great food. Hopefully we’ll make this a regular occurrence!

Cheers!