This remains a remarkably complex and flavorful wine but now it's elegant and refined as well with polished tannins. Classic Caymus in that it stretches the flavors with a range that goes from herb and tea to ripe plum and cherry. Finishing with a long complex aftertaste and still enough tannin to carry it another decade or more.--1986 California Cabernet horizontal. -JL

In the blind tasting I first thought this was a Spanish wine given the intense pain grillee toasty oak and vanilla aromas. After ten minutes some of the oak dissipated allowing the wine's flamboyant blackcurrant fruit to emerge. Full-bodied exceptionally concentrated with a seamless velvety texture and a marvelously long opulent finish this 1986 Cabernet tastes like a jar of jam on the palate with great purity and staying power. Although it appears to be fully mature it will last for another 10-15 years. This impressive sweet creamy exotic and flamboyant wine merits the praise it has received.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.

From Caymus' estate vineyards in Rutherford and aged in oak for about four years before release. The nose is all dried leaves and herbs, the pyrazine character of Cabernet Sauvignon evident in the glass along with tobacco, cedar and wet leaves. Lean and mature, but to my amazement, there's still an element of fruit on the palate.