Root: 1 Cab 2005

2005
Cabernet Sauvignon

Colchagua Valley, Chile

Will drink again (yet another good value - great taste for the money).

The Guy and I have had Root: 1 before and enjoyed it, but it was prior to posting our blog. So I decided to revisit it this weekend on a whim when I saw it for $9.99. I smelled and tasted . . . "Hot Rocks" - not The Rolling Stones, mind you, just hot rocks. This is an awesome experience. I've had it before with another previously reviewed wine (Terra Bossa 2004 Cabernet), but not as strong as this. It is definitely an "earthy" taste but taken to the next level. It really reminds me of granite warmed by the sun. I believe this is different, however, than a "mineral" experience. Which, brings me to my next reflection: the mineral survey. Thank you to those of you who participated. Next time I'll let a survey run without deadline.

The November issue of Wine Enthusiast (http://www.wineenthusiast.com/) has an article by Tim Patterson on the last page: Rocks In My Head - The rule in trying to grasp the elusive concept of minerality is, fake it 'till you taste it.

Mr. Patterson basically writes that he at first tasted minerality everywhere in every wine, trying hard to understand it. He even attended seminars related to geology and vineyard cross-sections and soil samples. He then checked the science behind it and seems to have succumbed to believing it's mostly "hooey". Some of what he had to say is summarized below:

"Nothing in winedom is more prized than the miracle of minerality. This elusive characteristic, found only in certain wines and discernible only to selected palates, carries a potent symbolic charge: tasting minerality is tasting the living soil that gave birth to grapes.

There's a good chance, of course, that minerality is mostly hooey.

First of all, people have the darndest time agreeing on what 'minerality' is . . . flavor, aroma, a texture?

Then there's the little problem that rocks don't taste or smell at all . . . (yet here he mentions his friends' contradictions) My mineral-centric buddies explained, with some condescension, that wet rocks clearly do have a smell - even a hosed-down sidewalk gives off a scent.

It gets worse. Modern plant biology holds that flavors and aromas are manufactured within the grapes through photosynthesis, not transported up from the ground into the berries.

More likely, according to state-of-the-art research, what gets called minerality is some combination of acidity and sulfur compounds."

I don't know exactly what minerality is or isn't. But I can tell you that I do indeed believe it exists. It is very exciting for me when I taste a wine that's got it. It only happened to me for the first time in the last couple of months and it's happened maybe three times total since. It was definitely a new experience for me and, I would say it was a textural thing when it happened. For lack of a better term, the wine "softened" all of a sudden in the finish. And it was pretty awesome.

For me, Root: 1 smelled exactly as it tasted. I knew when I smelled it that it was going to give me that "hot rocks" taste. I did not taste a lot of fruit - slight cherry in the beginning followed by spicey earthiness and warm stone with a lingering finish. But, alas, there was no mineral experience here.

Robert Parker gave this wine a 90 rating.

8.25 out of 10
$9.99 / 750 ml bottle
14% alc. by vol.
http://www.root1wine.com/