In Robert Parker's Wake

Wine critic Robert Parker splashed through Paso Robles this week, and left behind a wake of about 600 open bottles. What to do, what to do . . .

I don’t know about you, but in Paso Robles we call that a great excuse for a party. A whole string of them, in fact.

ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers) organized Mr. Parker’s annual California zinfandel tasting here, and simultaneously, Hospice du Rhone organized the annual California Rhone tasting. The open bottles are then collected and each year different wineries graciouly host a series of tastings for industry professionals. This year the Rhone bottles were offered over three consecutive nights at two San Luis Obispo wineries, Edna Valley Vineyard and Domaine Alfred, and the zinfandels were available for tasting this Thursday and Friday at Peachy Canyon in Paso Robles.

(Sorry, these tastings are open only to professionals and employees in the San Luis Obispo wine industry. Please do not call the wineries regarding these tastings.)

I attended the Thursday night tasting and wandered through 150 open bottles from all over the state. The bottles were not arranged alphabetically or by region, or in any particular order at all. Some were barrel samples, and nearly all were from the 2004 vintage. There was not a single notebook in sight, but with plenty of winemakers and cellarpeople in the room there was no lack of interesting discussion.

Left, the Ravenswood lineup included seven 2004 releases. Biale was also represented by seven wines. I tasted only two of each series, as I was focusing more on new and under-the-radar producers. My favorite new Paso Robles producer, and a wine that I felt really stood out, was the Minassian-Young 2004 Zinfandel. It had plenty of deep raspberry, jammy zin fruit without being overtly sweet.

I discovered that in tasting a large number of zins quickly (and spitting), the flavors of edgy, citric zins made the jammy zins taste much sweeter—and vice versa. Also, with the number of zin samples, spit cups, and overfilling pour pots the whole room was drenched in wonderful zin aromas, but that made some shy degrees of oxidation or volatile acidity harder to pick up. I found it wise to revisit wines I liked initially, and ask for others’ first impressions.

Right, Jake Raines of Full Circle Cellars contemplates a table full of offerings. Wines ranged from the very jammy, deep-and-sweet styles to more classic, high-pepper, briary styles. I enjoy both styles when well done. A few wines fell into a weird DMZ category—they had a thick sweetness that clashed with strong lemon high tones—theories ranged from green raisining (picking dehydrated grapes that never fully ripened) to ill-advised additions of acid. Good or bad, every wine has a back story, a blueprint, and every winemaker tries to read it.

And after much contemplation and discussion, we retired to Villa Creek for sustenance and a restorative margarita, with little red smiley marks at the edges of our lips.