I went to the grocery store and wanted a "good" cabernet, not one of the 12 dollar bottles I was used to buying: took a flier on this one because the lower-end cab is excellent, especially in my habitual price range. I paid 35 dollars and 94 cents for this bottle retail. After the first sip I went looking online for reviews because I really thought there was some kind of highbrow wine thing I did not know that I should read about in order to appreciate what I was tasting. Cherry? Blackcurrant? Where? Topnotes are gatorade, grapefruit rind and possibly cyanide, and maybe something you left out on top of the fridge one day when you were high. Cocoa and Cassis are MIA. Aftertaste is deeply bitter; something like quinine mixed with liquid hand soap. I waited a while after opening it since they say it's supposed to "breathe" and I thought maybe that was the problem. After decanting it was a little better -- say five percent better and I at least made less of a face when the tannins were left. I'm serious, this stuff is just bad. Tannin this bitter is not a "wallop"; it is possibly something that could be developed to make prisoners talk. I was looking into making my own wine in my garage, and if my efforts had produced something like this I would have given up and gone back to my day job immediately. Truly awful. I gave it two stars because, well, I don't want to be mean to Frankie.
