Dunn Howell Mountain Cabernets

huge and tannic Monday night with dry aged steaks. Opened it and decanted it 1 hour prior to drinking. Still a tannic monster.

Nope. Still have an '85 that is never going to be opened.

I've got '94, '95 and '99 that I'm sitting on. A '90 Napa drunk a few years back was good and ready, but that's a somewhat different beast.

Mark Lipton

Decent article about Randy Dunn in SF Chronicle, at

Text below is from the article: Dunn has been on a crusade to reverse the upward spiral of alcohol in Cabernet, a trend he sees as not only destroying the style of wine on which Napa has made its reputation but also neutralizing any sense of place.

He is so opposed to making wine above 14 percent alcohol that he openly resorts to a controversial method known as reverse osmosis, which removes some of his wine's alcohol.

Dunn has been lobbying wine publications to review higher-alcohol wines separately from lower-alcohol wines, so that a 13 percent Cabernet would be tasted in a different flight from a 15 percent wine...

...He and two UC Davis researchers are preparing to publish research that confirms what Dunn has insisted for years: Tasting higher-alcohol wines affects the way we taste lower-alcohol wines, especially in a large grouping.

They concluded that "alcohol concentration needs to be considered when professionally assessing wine quality," according to a draft paper - perhaps with separate sittings for wines of different alcohol levels.