#CabFrancDay with Dracaena Wines
We love excuses to buy wines we don’t normally come across. Twitter is an endless font of such excuses. It feels like every day there’s a new wine or cocktail celebration that we’d have no knowledge of if not for social media. Well, we’re all about conformity, folks. If the crowd is doing something, we’re gonna do it, too.
This brings us to Cabernet Franc day. Cab Franc is one of those varietals you just don’t see that often. Sure, you’ll drink it in a Bordeaux here or there, but how often do you see “Cabernet Franc” on the front of a wine label? When we saw #CabFrancDay on Twitter, we thought is was the perfect reason for us to try a domestic offering.
Our first bottle of Cab Franc was a Canadian production (not good); we’ve had a few bottles of Chinon (all excellent); and we’ve definitely tasted a domestic Cab Franc or two. We’ve not, as far as we can recall, actually drank a Cab Franc produced in the U.S.. That’s where Dracaena Wines comes in. They’re located in Paso Robles, California and they make a Cab Franc varietal. Perfect. We’ve been meaning to order a bottle from them for months. Cab Franc Day was just the push we needed. On to our tasting notes!
Like most people, we drink our wine on the hearth in front of a roaring fire.
Blackberries, lavender and thyme on the nose. A little bit of beeswax too. Almost arterial in color. The legs cling to the glass for what feels like forever. Blackberries, field greens, vanilla and some oak and pepper on the tongue. Pepper, tobacco and licorice on the finish. Medium bodied. A little acidity. A little bit of tannins. Nicely balanced.
It’s pleasantly fruit forward, more richly so than, say, a Chinon. You’d expect just that from the combination of this grape and the long growing season in Paso Robles. We really liked it. The one criticism we have is that it’s a little heavy on the oak for our tastes. It distracted from the fruit. A few years aging in the bottle should help with that somewhat.
We’re pretty happy with this as our first bottle of California Cab Franc. The fruit is excellent and the wine making is really solid, as demonstrated by the well balanced structure. We’re really curious to see if a few more years of aging brings down the oakiness some. Unfortunately, we’re not great at letting good bottles of wine age. They don’t last very long in our house. We might have to buy a case and hope one or two survive a couple of years.
Dracaena Wines is located in Paso Robles, California. You can learn all about them at http://dracaenawines.com/.
