Taste it Again / Lost & Found

Taste it Again: A Trio of Calamus Wines (Big Chill Weekend 2014 - part 2)

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Category: Lost & Found / Taste it Again

(August 23, 2014) ... It was a weekend for flights, as my previous experience with Colchester Ridge wines proved ... But unlike my Lake Erie flight this Niagara Bench flight had a real winner, as well as something shy and something ... well let's just call it interesting. From out of my boxes of wine I brought on this weekend I found three bottles of Calamus Estate reds: a Merlot, a Cabernet Sauvignon and a wine just called Red, all from different years. Let's start with the "interesting" bottle which just so happens to be the one last mention above.

The Calamus 2005 Calamus Red I labelled as "interesting" because it had a strong start showing off oak, dried cherry, and smoke, but then started showing hints of volatile acidity (aka: nail polish remover) and it never looked back. The promise was there ... But it fell short.

The shy bottle was the Calamus 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon, not at all what I was expecting. This one came off as a little muted on both nose and palate, and worst of all it never seemed to want to evolve, it just stayed like that, as if in some kind of suspended animation in its lifecycle. I chalked this one up to a wine being in a dumb phase and moved on ... Hopefully one of my few remaining bottle will show better in months to come. My fingers are crossed.

The real winner of the Calamus line-up was the 2008 Merlot, which should come as a surprise because '08 was not a very awe-inspiring year. But the Merlot has all the goodies you'd want in a Merlot on a late-summer afternoon: Light and fruity with some floral notes. Palate had some lovely red berries and touches of blue fruit. Right from the get go it came off as delicate and delicious.  If you have some of this wine in the cellar its time to drink it up.

To read the original reviews of the above wines click on the wine's name below:
Calamus 2005 Calamus Red (original review: April 2007)
Calamus 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon (original review: undated)
Calamus 2008 Merlot (original review: August 2011)

Taste it Again / Lost & Found: Red Tractor 2008 Red Tractor + Two Others

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Category: Lost & Found / Taste it Again

(August 23, 2014) ... My weekend of older Ontario wines continued with a tasting of a trio of diverse wines from different years, starting with this Sideroad Twenty 2008 Red Tractor Reserve Merlot which seems to have lost its will to live in bottle, or even outside of the bottle, it's tired and lacks any fruit character and in fact the only distinguishing character it does have is one of wood, which it maintained for about 10 minutes before it became blah (I know, a real informative descriptor).

The next two wines did not fare much better, in fact, of the three wines, the Red Tractor was the best (watch that be taken out of context for marketing purposes). A bottle of Hernder 2002 Reserve Cabernet Franc Reserve, unfiltered, was, quite simply put, just foul ... And a Fielding 2005 Cabernet Franc, unfiltered, had a corked nose, which had a glimmer of dried fruit on the palate before the corkiness slipped in on the palate as well ... Damn.

I have reviewed the Red Tractor in its youth, to read the original review from October 2012 - click here.

The other two wines were previously unreviewed, therefore they fall into the Lost & Found category, and in that case they receive a Lost & Found Rating ... Both get TRASH, but the Fielding one is a reluctant rating due to the wine being corked.