Tasting - Merlot

 Cracked open a bottle of merlot with my buddy Adam tonight (along with a Pinot Noir, but that's the next review).

Wine: Yellow Tail Merlot

Location: South Eastern Australia

Year: 2021

Price: $7 ish

Color: dark red, purple almost. Rich, clear red color along the edges, like garnet?

Legs: relatively thin, assumed that meant lower sugar, higher alcohol 

Smell: "spice-ey" as in some spice character (mayber black pepper? maybe bell pepper?) but not like hot spicy. Tart cherries. After tasting, the alcohol smell was more pronounced. Wondering if that was something other than ethanol, as that is supposed to be odorless (was there methanol or something else in there in trace amounts?). 

Taste: lower tannins than expected from color & odor. Still tart cherry flavor (like a cheribundi sort of flavor). At one point I was thinking earthy/mineraly. Popped back to smell to find the mineraly character, ended up thinking about gravely soil, just made me think of cold and close to the ground.

General Notes: from the thin legs, clear alcohol odor, and feel of heat in my throat, assumed alcohol content was around 14%, but it was actually lower at 13.5%. We kept trying to figure out what the "spice" flavor was but were ultimately unsuccessful. Adam settled on "spice mix".

Wine Folly suggests we should have been tasting cherry, plum, chocolate, bay leaf, and vanilla. I got the cherry, and could maybe trick myself into tasting plums, but the chocolate, bay leaf, and vanilla were nowhere to be found. I have bay leaves, so we smelled those and agreed that was not in the wine.