1986 Kenwood Cabernet Sauvignon Artist's Series

This wine from Kenwood is a monster Cabernet Sauvignon, exhibiting youthful colors, and huge quantities of fruit, extract, glycerin, and tannin. The 1986 Cabernet Sauvignon Artists Series exhibits an opaque purple/plum-like color with light pink at the rim. Its fragrant bouquet offers scents of underbrush, jammy fruit, cedar, pepper, and herbs. Absolutely colossal in the mouth, with huge amounts of fruit, glycerin, and extract, as well as staggeringly painful levels of tannin, this wine needs another 4-6 years of cellaring. It is a massive example of California Cabernet Sauvignon that should easily survive another 20-25 years. But will it ever develop any finesse or complexity? The tasting notes for this section are from two single blind tastings, one conducted in May, 1996, in California, and the other in June, 1996, in Baltimore.