Sharing a bottle (or two or three or four)

They say the best two days you own a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. The same can be said for wine - there is nothing like tasting new wines at a winery and buying ones you like (only to see the sticker shock on your monthly credit card bill 30 days later). This is only surpassed by those great days when you open said bottle and share it with others. I store almost all my wine in a professionally managed storage facility that has the benefit of also having a small tasting room. This past week I had the joy of opening two bottles of Joseph Phelps (2019 Insignia and Backus) with fellow enophiles that over the course of an hour morphed into a few more joining us and sharing their bottles (an Andremily and a Fingers Crossed). It's such a great way to try new wines that candidly I had never heard of. And none of us really care if we are sharing $20 bottles or $200 bottles (if we added another zero we might start to care - no two zero disparities).

I have no pics of my Phelps bottles (but I do still have eleven bottles of each so I'll have plenty of opportunities in the future). Given that I had a case of each, and both were somewhat young I wanted to compare the Insignia (red blend) vs the pure 100% cab Backus. Normally I prefer Backus, in fact it's probably my favorite wine, but in this case I felt the Insignia (again at the six-year age mark) was more flavorful (I felt the Backus was almost too smooth lacking the tannins of a young cab). The Insignia was predominantly cab (93%) plus 5% petit verdot (for coloring I would guess) and 2% malbec. Others tasting with me preferred the Backus. Bottom line both were very good wines. I wish I could remember more about the Andremily (it was a 2016 Mourvedre) and Fingers Crossed (pinot but not sure of the vintage) but by then we were on bottles three and four and for those of us that taste at wineries, we know it's a blur at that point. And I fell asleep by 8pm :)