Box Wines
A wine blog with news and reviews of affordable wines

Price: $13
Maker: 3 Loose Screws, Napa, California
Varietal: Merlot
Packaging: 750 ml bottle, screw cap
Alcohol: 13.5%
Our Rating: 8 out of 10

Clearly, the marketing approach for the makers of Screw Kappa Nappa Merlot 2004 and its fellow SKN wines emphasizes not taking themselves too seriously. Rather than downplaying the potentially suspect screw cap, the brand revels in it. We’ve seen this wine in the $11 - 13 range, so it’s affordable but not dirt cheap. The nose was fairly typical, nice jammy berries with spicy overtones. The flavor had blackberry, cherry, licorice, and woody notes, with spicy oak in the finish. There was a not altogether pleasant sharpness in our bottle that air alone didn’t seem to cure. We found the wine drinkable and even interesting, but there are plenty of Merlots in the $5 to $10 range that appealed to us at least as much as this one.

We found inexpensive Merlots like Bohemian Highway Merlot 2004 and Forest Glen Merlot 2003 more to our personal taste. Nevertheless, we wouldn’t give up on the diverse wines of Don Sebastiani & Sons - we’ve had good luck with a number of their offbeat-labeled wines, and we’ll certainly keep trying them.

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