2006 Adelaida Paso Robles zinfandel
This bottle of zin arrived with the latest club shipment from Adelaida this fall. We’d visited them a couple years back, and, since we enjoyed their wines, and they’re hard to find in San Francisco, we joined up.
Paso Robles is the unsung wine region of California if you ask me. Everyone knows about Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Barbara Even Santa Cruz and humble Temecula have broad regional recognition. I always get the sense that Paso is either ignored or forgotten, which is too bad. Wine Spectator is starting to get on the bandwagon. I read a long article recently about the exciting terroir-based wines that are coming out of this region, though I’ve known about that for some time already.
The Adelaida website says that this bottle is a blend of zinfandel grown in two mountainside vineyards lying on the Westside of Paso. It looks like they’ve also produced a single-vineyard designated zin which is already sold out. That’s too bad, as it would have been great to compare the two side-by-side.
2006 Adelaida Paso Robles zinfandel: This is a toasted opaque purple black color. Hegui detected a musky scent, like forest floor or maybe lichen. It opened up after about fifteen minutes in the glass. The medium to full-bodied wine fills the mouth with blue fruit, sour cherry and cherry Twizzler. We detected some mineral but I had trouble finding that Paso Robles terroir that I’ve noticed in other Adelaida offerings. This was good but we wouldn’t necessarily go hunting for it again.