| I'm finding a lot of good stuff in the supermarket these days. My "find" is the local P&C Foods, a chain that took over the space after Grand Union pulled out of my area. I have so far found many good wines there for ridiculously low prices, such as the magnificent 1997 Sebastiani Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon for $12. My theory is that they don't really know what they have; and when they find a case of wine in the back room that has some dust on it, they lower the price and put it out on the floor. And so I found this wine, dusty and only $9.
Gallo of Sonoma seems to be doing a lot of good work these days. After drinking their 1997 Zinfandel, I lost my deep seated aversion to the brand and decided to try out some more.
Anyway, to the wine. A nice red, if I had to reduce it to just that. I expected more, but at $9 it's a really good Cabernet Sauvignon for the money. It's also pretty widely available. It was a deep, purplish red--not quite opaque, but dense. The aroma--earthy with some peppery spice--was less pronounced than other Sonoma Cabernets I've had, but this seems consistent with Gallo's style. Tastewise, it's an easy drinking Cab, not overwhelming in either the fruit or tannin categories, but it's maybe a little more acidic than some would expect. From my perspective, that's a good thing: I drank it alongside linguine and sausage in tomato sauce, and it matched well. If, like me, you lean toward Italy in your dining preferences, this may be a good wine for you. In the final analysis, I concur with a remark I saw about this wine elsewhere on the web: there are a lot of $20 Cabernets out there that score lower than this one.
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