Groth Birthyear Vintage Napa Cab for festive family holiday dinner

Groth Birthyear Vintage Napa Cab for festive family holiday dinner

Further to our Festive Christmas Eve family dinner featured in an earlier blogpost, we also opened an aged birthyear vintage bottle for the occasion.,

We hold in our cellar collection a horizontal of wines for each of our kids’ (and grandkids’) birth year vintages that we hold to open for special occasions and family gatherings. So it was that tonight I also pulled from the cellar a birthyear vintage wine for son Alec, joining us for Christmas Eve dinner. 

As our kid’s get older, the window for holding and tasting birth year wines is rapidly closing, and, we still hold a collection of wines that need to be consumed. In this case, for our youngest son Alec, the 1990 vintage was especially extraordinary.  

Three #1 Wine Spectator Top 
100 Wines from 1990 vintage

Three times, three different wines from the 1990 vintage were awarded #1 Wine of the Year by Wine Spectator Magazine as part of their annual Top 100 Wines of the Year.. 

This is a testament to the global success of the vintage, one was from California, one from Bordeaux and one from South Australia, a further testament to the amazing spectacular 1990 vintage. 

 

All these wines were acquired upon their release back in the early nineties, in some cases, even before being so recognized and heralded.  

We also hold large format bottles of birth year vintage wines for these years in our collection. I blogged about these wines and big bottles in a previous blogposts. 

Tonight, with the hearty beef roast dinner, I pulled from the cellar this 1990 Napa Cabernet for a wine pairing. 

Groth Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 1990 

This is the standard Groth estate cuvee’ offering. It had 15% Merlot added to round out the blend. 

We visited the Groth Estate back in the late nineties for a tour and tasting.

Notably winemaker for this wine was none other than Nils Venge.  

This release awarded 90-92 points by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, and 90 points by Wine Spectator.  

The Wine Advocate Review was back in 06/1992. The Wine Spectator Review was a decade later  in 02/2001.

Parker referred to the classic Groth style - sweet, almost intensely opulent fruit flavors, silky tannins, and hedonistic.

At thirty four years of age, aside the soiled label, the foil, and most importantly the fill level and the cork were in ideal condition. 

This bottle was past its prime drinking window and was showing diminution from age. The body was slightly murky and the dark garnet color was taking on a slight brownish hue. The blackberry fruits were turning slightly tart and starting to give way to non-fruit flavors of earth, tobacco and leather, with notes still apparent of herbs, coffee, spice and cassis with tangy acid predominating on the finish. A momento tasting but time to drink up as a last vestige of this vintage cuvée. 

RM 87 points. 

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