Oso Libre
Today I made a Monday afternoon visit to the tasting room at Oso Libre and walked out with my latest wine club membership, adding onto Lone Madrone and Anarchy as my growing list of Paso wine club memberships.
Certainly one of my favorite things about the Paso wine scene is how it takes me back to the California I feel in love with when I moved here in the late aughts, and a weekday afternoon is the epitome of that experience. I walk into a tasting room and find I’m the only one there save for a lovely soul who is pouring today, and we’re all set up to hang out and have a lovely one-on-one wine experience together. Having that ambiance just a 10-15 minute drive down the road from the Sunrise Estate makes it all the more magical.
Oso Libre is a red focused vineyard, which suits my taste perfectly well, but the started off their tasting flight with the seemingly requisite white. In my book, if you’re gonna do white wine in California, you might as well make it Charddonay, and Oso Libre seemed to agree. Their example was a balance between steel and oak with a flavor profile that struck me as leaning somewhat to the oaky side. My pallate loves oaky Chardonnays, so I took that as a good thing while noting that the overall balance would likely make it an enjoyable wine for a wide audience.
Red wines from Oso were characterized by rich flavors that were more ready to drink than most tasting room reds - likely due to the extra aging their wine maker likes to do before bottling and selling, evidenced by the vintages I was drinking, all in the 4-5 years old range. The Rojo Del Patron particularly stood out to me - a cab/primitivo blend that really just tasted to me like a lovely example of my favorite grape, Zinfandel. Of course Primitivo and Zinfandel are the same grape by different names, though I’m not sure what happened with the cab here - it’s as though it decided just to complement the zin and not get in anybody’s way. Kudos to the blender on this one.
I closed my tasting with a couple of off-menu tastings: a late harvest Primitivo and a Port wine. The Port was a bit over the top for me - I believe it was 22% alcohol and it surely tasted every bit like it. The Primitivo, though, was sublime. I can’t recall tasting a more perfectly executed late harvest wine in the last 5 years, and with that Primitivo/Zinfandel base flavor I was instantly hooked.
This was certainly a fantastic success for a Monday afternoon. I’m looking forward to the return trips and tastings that will surely be in my future as now that I have little choice but to return and pick up the club wines that will be coming my way.
