Storybook Mountain Estate Reserve Zinfandel 2007

Professional Ratings

• 96 Connoisseurs' Guide
  This bright and buoyant young wine is rife with a wealth of precise, optimally ripened blackberry fruit, and, while rich and nicely extracted, it never once drifts towards the chocolaty excesses that plague so many big Zins. Supple and fleshy with a bit of baby fat at the moment, it exhibits exemplary balance and structure with well-placed acids, and a light touch of tannin adds welcome firmness to the finish. Its stays fixed on deep, nascent berryish fruit all the way to the end, and it comes with reasons aplenty to expect that even more to like will come if it is allowed to develop for a few years.
• 92 Wine & Spirits
  This starts out stemmy and jammy-combining something green with superripe flavors of raspberries and currants. With air, a more relaxed claret emerges as the initial intensity and alcohol begin to subside. This is blacker and warmer than Storybook's best vintages of their Estate Reserve.
• 91 Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
  The top wine, but still somewhat closed and needing another 6-12 months of bottle age, is the 2007 Zinfandel Estate Reserve. This is Seps' 250-case selection of his best stuff. The wine shows more structure, density, and richness, but is not yet exhibiting the charm and seductive power of his Eastern Exposures or Mayacamas Ranch. Deep ruby/plum-colored, with loads of crushed rock and pepper, as well as sweet red fruits such as cherry, boysenberry and black raspberry, it is deep, clean, pure, but slightly tannic and needing some bottle age. It should be an atypical Zinfandel in that it will evolve for 7-10 years.
  91+ points.