Tobin James "Liquid Love" Late Harvest Zinfandel 2004

Want to try something really different, that’s actually special if handled correctly? I picked up a bottle of Tobin James “Liquid Love” the other day as a Valentine’s Day experiment. We opened the bottle not knowing what to expect. The bottle itself is thin, about as big around as a towel tube, giving one the impression of concentration. Well, the wine is concentrated, but not in the way that normal wines are concentrated. In a normal wine, the winemaker makes decisions to create a highly extracted wine, resulting in a dark, syrupy liquid filled with mysterious power and, if not treated carefully, too much alcohol from grapes harvested late and fermented too long. In the case of Tobin James “Liquid Love” the grapes were intentionally harvested late, allowing the sugars to concentrate. Then the wine was handled carefully to prevent runaway fermentation. The alcohol is still quite high (at 17.5 percent) but the residual sugars (4 percent) and glycerin are substantial enough to counter the alcohol. The result is a drink that is of medium transparency with modest extraction, very low acidity and a cloying sweetness not found in normal wine. This sweetness allows a person to eat similarly sweet and tannic foods like chocolate, which normally would kill the flavor of just about any wine. In fact, I found the inclusion of chocolate to be essential to the experience, since drinking the wine by itself was almost suffocating. The chocolate cut the sweetness in the wine, allowing the other flavors to emerge. Taken together, the chocolate and wine tasted unlike anything I’ve encountered before. And of course the mixture of downers and uppers was a little like drinking absinthe with a hit of cane sugar. Really different, and special, if handled correctly.

Cheers!