2004 Francis Tanahill "The Hermit" Pinot Noir

mikewillison

This wine has just been released so my notes are a many layered cake of unfairness and like a totally unsophisticated blob of a review that is endemic of the type of person that goes to a restaurant on opening night and complains that the place doesn't have their sh*t together. I am all of the sudden that guy. The wine is given to me thus: just out of the shower, towel all akimbo, hair in a salon-less state of disarray, no make up ( is that a pimple?!), smears of anti-perspirant accent the underarms I have been trying not to look at and all the while I have forgotten that all of this stuff is just window dressing. Yet, here I go, slashing and spewing vitriolic blatherings all about the place like someone had just lathered eggnog on my vinyl copy of "houses of the holy." I'll kill you, by the way. You can have "coda" for your stupid experiment, maybe III (I'm having a Rennaisance), but keep your eggy and nutmeggy hands off the proper goods. So... the wine. The color is semi-opaque and does well by candlelight. It is not clear, not too dense, and not cloudy in a platlet rich sort of way either. It is rosy and murky but not disturbingly so. This wine smells like a great Outkast reference: "Oooh, Oooh Oooh (roses really smell like)." They knew then that roses can smell like some old bag of laundry. My grandmother wore a perfume that smelled of warm roses that had sat in a bud vase for too long; add some sandalwood or cedar and we are almost there. The wine is very lively in the front palate but is weak in the middle. The finish is long and as bizaarre as the nose. I was instantly reminded of old boat. There was a baked, ancient, and musty thing that lingers. Pipe tobacco is being smoked somewhere by your old uncle Gene, Aunt Betty is reheating frozen sausage and applying Mrs. Butterworth's maple syrup, and you lie festering in your room, and all that you can taste is the coating from the five Advil that you swallowed without water before you went to bed. I cannot wait to taste this next fall...

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