Tyrrell's Lost Block Merlot 2006

I'm a bit of a Tyrrell's fan, and my cellar is well stocked with Vat 1s and 9s (amongst others). I also have a few bottles of both vintages (so far) of the 4 Acres Shiraz. As an aside, I shared a bottle of the 2005 earlier this year with some erudite American wine friends and it floored us all, even when tasted alongside many exotic wines from around the world. Such perfume, acidity, elegance and structure. Hunter Shiraz indeed.

The Lost Block Merlot, however, is a rather different proposition. I was at the local bottlo last night, looking for something cheap and cheerful, and out jumped this wine, complete with a "special" tag underneath the row of bottles. So I grabbed it, figuring it would probably be well made at least.

And it is that. I will somewhat sheepishly admit that I guzzled this wine without so much as a second thought, and the wine participated willingly in my endeavour. Only towards the end of the (ostensibly shared) bottle did I tire of the wine's rather confected, overly intense mid and back palate sweetness. Otherwise, it's not a bad quaffer. It has some nice black olive and tobacco notes, and enough acidity to prop the wine up and prevent it from feeling completely flabby. But there's not a hell of a lot of structure here, nor is there much balance, the wine tipped as it is so far into the sweet fruit spectrum at the expense of almost everything else. I don't know if there's a whack of residual sugar here or whether it's just the fruit -- either way, it does become cloying after a couple of glasses, and you'd want to be eating something that balanced this out (pizza perhaps). I had it with a chicken dish that contained tomato and silverbeet but perhaps not enough strength of flavour, acidity and weight to keep the wine under control.

When next selecting a cheap quaffing red, I will probably not revisit this wine. A couple of wines tasted recently, the Mount Pleasant Phillip 2003 and the Wirra Wirra Scrubby Rise Red 2006, were both much more satisfying cheapies.