wow. i love this wine. i first tried this bottle two years ago. i had always been curious about the montes alpha wines but had never really had the cash to justify buying one. then when i was in bolivia for work i came across the 2002 and 2004 syrah and 2004 cab in some supermarket for the equivalent of ten bucks (...oh how i long for the days of a strong dollar once again), and couldn't resist. i loved the 02 syrah the first time i tried it - i think at the time i may have even said that it was my favorite wine EVER. it just has a really great sort of brooding licorice quality to it. not too jammy really, but big dark fruit and just tannic enough to make you feel like you are drinking wine, not wicked expensive grape juice. i have since found this wine online at international cellar for 16.99, a price well worth paying in my humble, extremely un-wine-educated opinion. so this time around i got to enjoy it with my buddies seth and sobo and their respective ladyfriends at chez sobo. sobo makes a mean lasagna, not to mention he produced an amount of lasagna that would have been enough to feed the entire 1998 brunswick high school boys soccer team (of which we were both members), even including bionic swedish exchange student henrik jacobson. in any case, the lasagna made a nice food pairing. this time around maybe i wasn't paying as much attention but the 02 syrah didn't completely blow me away like it did the first time. it was very, very good - even exceptional, but i would not say it is my favorite wine ever. it tasted a little thinner to me than i had remembered and lacked the sort of dark, syrupy (but not sweet), concentration that made my like it so much last time. david ogilvie, a fellow wine blogger from "purple lips", who is actually professionally and educationally qualified to hold an opinion about such things seems to think that the '02 syrah is "not holding it's age in the mouth", which, if i am understanding correctly what that might mean, it could be why i had such different feeling about this one a couple of years. again - in my opinion, this wine rulez (yes, with a z), but is not the A+ material i had felt that it might turn out to be. that said, it is well worth your money and time.
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