Browning in color, with mounds of dry spice, tea and earth aromas, but also a cooked, overoaked quality that doesn’t serve the wine well. The palate is plodding and doesn’t really evolve, while flavors of brown sugar, obvious oak and roasted berry seem to be fading. Expensive for what’s in the bottle.——M.S.(8/1/2009)—— 84

Earthy and showing clay, milk chocolate, baked cherry and mocha aromas and flavors, and while the wine feels fairly smooth it doesn’t do much but lay there on the palate. Kind of heavy, amorphous and seemingly fading, and overall it’s a junior version of Salentein’s dying Primum Pinot from 2004.——M.S.(8/1/2009)—— 83