Boekenhoutskloof Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

Once you get past the ridiculously overwrought bottle - it's so big and heavy that no foil cutter I know of could possibly work - what you get is a wine that smells, well, expensive: generic New World Napa-esque fruit + some very expensive Bordeaux toast oak. Hm.

The surprise is entirely in the mouth: the weight is much more French than Napa, and it tastes mostly of very high quality oak. It seems just a little bit watery and then it's gone. There's a very small amount of tannin - frankly, it feels wimpy - and then it's gone. Again: Hm.

I'll come back to this later on and see if it improves, but as of right now, the bottle is the only thing that's impressive here, which is odd considering their $8 wines are pretty good (the Porcupine Ridge line).

Later: After an hour's aeration, this started to taste like mesquite or cedar incense, the kind you'd be in an American national park on summer vacation. Cedar, cedar, cedar, and more cedar. Yawn. Kind of tasty, but utterly lacking in personality. Avoid.

Boekenhoutskloof