I’m a fan of cowboy films. My Granddad was a complete Western fiend and would read cowboy adventure stories and watch Westerns whenever he got the chance, I’ve inherited a bit of that. I even enjoyed Cowboys vs Aliens far more than anyone has a right to, so I was rather taken by the label of this wine.
I know, I know I constantly say I won’t judge a wine by its label, or a book by its cover, but I will buy them on that criteria. I therefore had quite low expectation of what the wine inside would actually be like.
It comes in a screw cap bottle, and the wine is a fresh purple colour with legs so thick they might be wearing chaps. The wine has quite an aroma, there’s plenty of plumminess, but there’s also something unexpected, a sort of chocolate too.
It’s dry with soft ripe tannins and some that were more oak than grape in feel. It’s full bodied with a hefty thwack of alcohol. At 14.5% it’s not a wine to mess with. That plum character comes through and the chocolate blends with a bit of coffee too. There were more tertiary flavours than I would have predicted.
Listed at £10, but probably closer to £8 if you use some of Virgin Wine’s Offers
, I thought this was good value, a John Wayne of the wine world. It wasn’t subtle, and it threw all its oaky alcohol straight at me, but it had a certain charm.
