The Big Daddy

It’s lovely having The Young One and Jo-Bow around.  They are easy people with a constant smile, and life around them is positive.  As the next generation, they are taking to wine, and enjoying learning about what they like.  With SWMBO and I, who are older and the former generation, The Young One and Jo-Bow tend to defer to our preferences in wine, because they think we know best.  But they are realising that it’s about taste and what you feel like yourselves, and as a group, and to try and suit the situation.

It was a cooler evening, and SWMBO had cooked a hearty meat-loaf for dinner.  We had a couple of options for accompanying wine: an elegant, but complex-flavoured Pinot Noir, or else a rather monumental Bordeaux-varietal based red.  In reality, either would have worked, but if one were being objective, the stronger wine was better for the food, and for the weather.  So that’s what they chose.  Well-done!

We opened the 2015 Babich ‘The Patriarch’ Gimblett Gravels Hawke’s Bay.  It’s a blend of 51% Cabernet Sauvignon, 27% Merlot and 22% Malbec.  It’s named after Josip Babich, who founded Babich Wines with his first vintage of grapes in New Zealand in 1916.  Historically for the family and for the New Zealand wine industry, he is a true patriarch.  The wine was impenetrable black-red colour.  The nose and palate packed densely with masses of ripe black fruits, and hints of spice, nutty, cedary and pencilly oak.  Absolutely gorgeous structure with the extraction to carry the wine for another decade, but fine-grained enough to make it enjoyable now.  Deliciously sumptuous and opulent, but carrying itself with a sense of style.  It didn’t overwhelm the flavoursome meat-loaf, but stood strong to be counted as something special on its own.  It added to the meal in flavour, and completed the evening.  I’m not a big daddy, but the wine was.