Otis Kenyon 2005 Merlot

It’s been high time for me to take a break from the steady progression of red blends, so I decided to open a bottle of Otis Kenyon’s newly released merlot.

Great wine. It is everything a merlot should be. It has nice fruit to it – cherry and currant (which I guess is kind of like saying it tastes like grape – go figure). The fruit’s balanced with just the right amount of bitterness. The tannins are a little rough, but not overwhelming. The finish has overtones of oak, pencil shavings and a licorice or anise finish.

This is a really well put together wine. Thanks to the movie “Sideways,” there’s sort of a stigma to liking merlot, but the reality is that it’s an excellent grape with plenty of nuance to it, when it’s put in the right hands. Otis Kenyon has done a great job of capturing a lot of its potential in this wine.

Otis Kenyon 2005 Matchless Red

I had this great idea of contrasting the Otis Kenyon Matchless Red with the Nicholas Cole GraEagle I wrote about in my last post. They’re both red blends. They’re both roughly the same price. But after that, I’m not sure it’s fair to put them in the same category.

Otis Kenyon is a brand-new winery south of town in Walla Walla. Otis Kenyon is named after a relative of the winery owners, but the story behind the relative is not your usual run-of-the-mill “I named my wine after my grandfather” tale. Read it here.

Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what grapes went into the Matchless Red. It’s probably your usual suspects – a lot of cab sauv, some merlot, etc.; but I just don’t know. The Otis Kenyon website doesn’t detail the varietals. Neither does the bottle. That’s kind of odd.

I thought I rememberd the wine as being fairly chalky and smoky from the first time I drank it. I was going to compare that to the way the GraEagle brings out the flavor of the fruit. After a second tasting, I don’t know if that’s entirely fair to the Matchless Red. It has plenty of fruit flavor, mostly plum, though it’s still somewhat understated versus the flavors of the GraEagle. It does have a chalky quality to it after the initial, subtle fruit. There’s a slightly smoky hint to its finish, which is otherwise fairly acidic.

From time to time, I like a wine that’s a little over-produced – tannins a little rough, a little too much time in dark-toasted oak. It’s easy to connect those flavors to the soil or to the barrel. People sometimes like to think that wines from Red Mountain taste like the volcanic soil the grapes grow in, and I tend to think it’s more because of how the wine is treated than where the fruit is grown. In the case of Otis Kenyon, its vineyards are in rocky alluvial soil, and it’s easy to make the leap from the chalky flavor to the big rough stones that are uprooted when the vineyard rows are dug.

At our local wine shop, the Matchless Red retails for $26; the GraEagle, for $27. Forced to choose, I’d go with the GraEagle. It’s a steal. I’m happy, though, that Otis Kenyon, despite being so new, has already shown up locally. I think their first release shows a lot of promise. I especially enjoyed their merlot. I’ll post tasting notes when we open one of the bottles of it.