Saturday Night – Let’s mess up the Top Ten list – Part 2

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The 2003 Rutherford Hill Merlot was a Zippy Sauce Top Ten wine that I have always felt a bit guilty about as all wines on the Top Ten are rated by all four of us except for it; only Mick and I rated it.

http://zippysauce.blogspot.com/2008/08/friday-night-guys-night.html

"Tastes much better than it looks"

The Rutherford Hill Merlot is a big, chewy, reach-out-of-the-glass-and-smack-you-in-the-face Merlot which is a style that Mick and I really enjoy. Amy prefers a more fruit forward Merlot and Kathy tends to like a more well rounded Merlot. So it would interesting to see how it would do ratings wise with the ladies in the picture.

"Still worthy of being a Top 10 wine"

The main course was grilled steak slices with fresh corn and baby potatoes. The dish also has diced celery and shallots, sliced cherry tomatoes and arugula. I think this is a really neat dish as other than salt, pepper and a little butter and olive oil to brown the potatoes with there are no spices. The different ingredients really bring the flavours of this dish and I find each mouthful is different from the next.

I wasn’t sure exactly what to pair this with at first so I decided to go with my favourite red wine rule – “When in doubt, go Merlot”. Narrowing the choice down to a Merlot, from there I decided that with the steak in the dish, I wanted a ‘bigger’ Merlot to go with it and Rutherford Hill popped into my head.

There is no doubt when you nose this wine it is a California red with loamy, plum and cedar aromas in the wine. Tasting the wine you get a dry, chewy, big Merlot with an enjoyable smoky tobacco flavour running throughout. This Merlot does a wonderful Cabernet Sauvignon impression, not quite a Cab but I could see someone mistaking it for one – big, lots of tannin and not as fruity as you’d expect from a Merlot. It was a good but not great pairing with meal. I think the main reason the pairing was good vs. great is the steaks were much leaner than I expected and didn’t cut through the tannin like I’d hoped.

The LCBO rating and Wine Spectator write-up were covered my early article about the Rutherford Hill Merlot so I won’t bother doing them again.

Here is the group rating for the wine -Mick – 90, Mark - 90, Kathy – 89, Amy – 89, Overall – 89.5.

As that is the four person rating for the wine, I will use this as the official rating which does, unfortunately remove it from the Zippy Sauce Top Ten. This is still a very good wine which I will happily recommend to anyone.

So at the end of the day, we gain a wine on the Top Ten and lose one as well. Both wines for the evening were enjoyable and I’m already looking forward to next Saturday’s wine adventures.

Cheers!

Mark.