This wine has traveled an awfully long way to my table here in San Diego: it’s from South Australia originally, was apparently imported to Germany at some point (the label says “Wein aus Australien” after all), wound up in a Chicago auction house, and now here it is, suddenly making my table look more sophisticated than it has any right to be. (I hid the carry-out pizza box outside just to make sure.)This is obviously a full mature wine: the nose has more to do with shoyu than grapes at this point, suggesting dusky vats, umeboshi, and dried cuttlefish (which, by the way, don’t really smell of fish, but rather of salt). There’s also a seductive aroma of dried cranberries, strawberry fruit leather, and freshly cut cedar. It’s decidedly strange – and yet appealing.The wine has all held together fairly well; it’s probably slightly past its peak at this point, but you do get more than sweet liquid and smoke, which is a relief. There’s a hint of musky, minty berry, a somewhat tired aged note, hints of charred coffee, and then it slinks away under the cover of darkness, leaving only a very slightly off note of sweet old wine. Tannins are still present, doing their best to support the fading fruit; it’s so very close to being a good older wine, at yet it’s not, not really.[By the way, please accept my apologies for labeling this Meritage. It isn’t, at least not technically, but it is a Bordeaux style wine: mostly cabernet (sauvignon and franc) with 5% merlot.]On second thought, this wine is likely displaying low level TCA contamination, unfortunately – it’s at that subliminal level where all it does is mask the true character and quality of the wine, I think. It isn’t immediately obvious, but it is, I believe, causing the strange muted character on the finish more than any other explanation of which I can conceive.Good on Jeffrey Grosset for moving to screwcaps – this shouldn’t happen with newer vintages.GrossetPrice: US $30ishClosure: CorkDate tasted: June 2008