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Puckered me up so much that it made my cat’s ass look like she’d just had a Botox shot…I am normally a fan of Rodney Strong Wines. Over the years I’ve found many of their wines to be good, trusted standbys in the $15-$20 range. Usually well-balanced and rich, though falling short of outstanding, but always drinkable and sometimes remarkable.

This is not the case with their 2002 Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon.

I was surprised and a bit suspicious when I saw this wine on the shelf at my local Trader Joe’s for the modest price of $14. But, being the drunk that I am with a taste for good wine but a jug wine budget, I decided it would be a good middle-of-the-road compromise. So I brought it home, shelved it for… well… a couple hours to be honest… and then cracked it as the 2nd course paired up with a spinach and feta stuffed flank steak. Sounds good, right?

Not right. The steak was chewey and the wine was rank.

Granted, I had just enjoyed a glass of Beauregard Zin–and Beauregard is my favorite wine at the moment– prior to opening this bottle of Rodney Strong’s latest layman’s cab. So that didn’t help Rodney’s case much. Or maybe it did– ’cause I was already half drunk when I got to this one, and I usually like just about anything when I’m loaded. So maybe, if I had gotten into this trough water when I was stone cold sober, I would have just up and vomited. You just never know. I do not, however, recommend trying.

There is not enough air in the atmosphere to settle this thing down. The first thing that hits you on tasting this pond water is a bucket of unripe strawberries. Hard ones. Take a green strawberry, set it on your counter for a week until it starts to turn orange and mold, then grind it up, add some Popov vodka, stuff your nose inside your baby’s shitty diaper for aroma and then gently sip the moldy strawberry vodka, rolling it around on your tongue, savoring the au d’ toilette. That was my first impression.

Well, maybe the baby shit was a stretch.

My second impression was… well… not an impression but really more of an idea. That idea started with “fuck” and ended with “it”. So I drank the rest anyway.

Third impression, an hour and a half later, is more realistic. See, the the deal with this wine is this: the fruit isn’t ripe enough to settle down the alcohol. And this is coming from a guy who loves alcohol. But this wine is so utterly lacking in complexity that it needs to be dumbed down with a review like this. Strawberries and Vodka. Maybe even raspberries and vodka. That’s this wine, in a nutshell.

So I’m going to give it 10 points because it has alcohol, 10 more because it has a reasonable amount of it (13.8%) and then I’m going to deduct 5 because I hate raspberries.

(5 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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