Dunn Howell Mountain 1997

Our generous friends invited us over for dinner on Christmas and the among the potent potable offerings that they served was a 1997 Dunn Howell Mountain. I had to taste this wine because of the recent buzz that I read about in the November issue of Wines and Vines called Wines Lunatic Heros written by Clark Smith about Randy Dunn using reverse osmosis. I was ready to cast aspersions on the wine but it proved to be very well balanced with leather and chocolate tones. It's not clear to me when Randy Dunn started using reverse osmosis for his wines, but I think that a wine should be tasted with the appropriate foods and then judged on those merits. I had their five year old daughter (whom I'm not so secretly training to be a sommelier, that is with parental approval) smell the aroma and she said definitively "peanuts". I got a whiff of reductive aromas but I think my nose is too keen on smelling any kind of sulfide notes. The wine opened up and the sulfide blew off, or my olfactory receptors tired as the evening progressed and the superbly crafted beef tenderloin was the appropriate foil for the Dunn Howell Mountain Cabernet sauvignon.