Cellar Craft CC Showcase Washington Merlot: Thoughts?

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ShepherdQ

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Bought the above kit on impulse whilst buying bottling supplies (I'll be bottling soon, after all, I need another kit, right!?!) Haven't found any mention of it here, but wondered if anyone had made it and had an opinion one way or the other.
 
Made that one. Never did come around for me. Even after 3 years in the bottle. Hope your outcome is better. One of the only Cellar Craft Showcase kits I have ever been basically unhappy with from first bottle to last. Very unusual for a Showcase kit.
 
Well, that's not cool, Mike, considering I'm bulk-aging one of these right now. Dangit! Don't discourage me like that! :d
 
Merlot IS one of my favorite wines and Washington state grows some fantastic Merlot. Still not sure what happened on that kit to this day. I was cranking out kits then and perhaps I did something foolish like letting it sit on the fines for 6 months before racking. Don't know. Just know that it never did taste all that great from one year to two years. I even added some tannin to the last case I had and it still didn't help it out. I hope everyones turns out fantastic like 99% of the other Showcase kits do.
 
Ugh, now what do I do? Dave, can you go sample yours and tell me what you think?! Kidding.

The CC Showcases have gotten great reviews, and the WA Merlot won an award, but I'd hate to spend all the time and money on a mediocre kit. I think I could still return it. Hmm, decisions.
 
I would make it. Chances are I wasn't paying as close attention as I should have with that one. We need more data points on that kit for sure. Plus its 3 years later. Different grapes!

Keep us posted on how it turns out.
 
Mine is still sitting quietly. I'm waiting until next month to try it. I'll let you all know.
 
Ours is at 17 months. It was decent at bottling (12 months). Time to crack open a bottle to see how it's coming along. I'll post back in a day or two.
 
After popping a bottle last night, we're hoping Mike's experience was due to a mistake in his process, but our current results at 17 months are not very promising. Hopefully it gets better with some more time. All of our CC showcase wines have shown better at this point so far. Even the Zin, which is a month younger, is noticeably better at this time. Maybe they sourced their grapes from the wrong side of Washington...:?
 
I just received two of the old lodi cc kits so glad to hear that one is the better of the two. I will scratch this merlot off the list. If you have any good merlot suggestions, please fire away as I do like a good merlot. Also, thinking of trying the CC showcase cabmerlot blend as I saw that had good reviews. Thanks.
 
Doing the eclipse stags leap now. Way young but I can tell it will be quite good.
 
Doing the eclipse stags leap now. Way young but I can tell it will be quite good.

I keep looking at that one but for some reason cannot ever pull the trigger. Probably because I have 12gals of merlot aging. But its the cheap stuff for table wine. From the reviews, it seems like a great wine even pretty young.
 
I made a few of these kits 18 months ago (first time, I have tried this kit). I bottled some at 1 year, and, it was tried by many folks at a family event. This kit was a favourite pick among other wines that I brought for tasting. It was a ripe jammy wine with raspberry fruit flavours.
I still have a carboy that I haven't bottled yet.
This isn't personally going to be one of my favourite kits, I would prefer a style that was not so "ripe, fruity, jammy", but everybody else seemed to love it.
Brian55; I am wondering if you got a kit from a substandard batch? I posted recently about some Cellarcraft GSM kits that were not the same as ones that I had previously made. This kind of thing does not seem to happen very often, but, over the years, it has happened.
 
I made a few of these kits 18 months ago (first time, I have tried this kit). I bottled some at 1 year, and, it was tried by many folks at a family event. This kit was a favourite pick among other wines that I brought for tasting. It was a ripe jammy wine with raspberry fruit flavours.
I still have a carboy that I haven't bottled yet.
This isn't personally going to be one of my favourite kits, I would prefer a style that was not so "ripe, fruity, jammy", but everybody else seemed to love it.
Brian55; I am wondering if you got a kit from a substandard batch? I posted recently about some Cellarcraft GSM kits that were not the same as ones that I had previously made. This kind of thing does not seem to happen very often, but, over the years, it has happened.

The only possible issue I can think of is that the kit was almost a year old when I started it. It's not bad at this point, it's just not what I'd consider good, compared to others around the same age. Time will tell.
 

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