Outside of a few pockets of fog, California is the land of warmth and sunshine. This has led some to conclude that California wines must always show evidence of this privileged climate through plush textures and opulent fruit.
I’ve never shared the view that climate dictates narrow styles of wine. Luminous days and warmth are of course an important element of the terroir in many California wine areas. Bright fruit is a California signature. But producers still have a wide latitude of expressions open to them, just as they do elsewhere.
Yet even sunny California sometimes must reckon with the unexpected from mercurial nature. Such was the case in Napa Valley in the 2011 vintage, when rain and unaccountably cool temperatures gave Californians a taste of what the rest of us endure. The vintage tested the skills and vision of many producers, who had little experience with the kind of years other regions in more marginal climates take for granted.
To see what Napa Valley made of a cool, wet year, the wine panel recently tasted 20 bottles of cabernet sauvignon from the 2011 vintage. Florence Fabricant and I were joined by two guests, Patrick Cappiello, wine director and a partner at Pearl & Ash on the Lower East Side, and Paul Grieco, an owner of Hearth and the mini-chain of Terroir wine bars.
Not all the ’11 Napa cabernets have been released, but we found enough to offer a cross-section of the low-to-middle end of the market. I say middle because our $100 cap eliminated a sizable number of well-known producers. I don’t mean cult cabernets like Screaming Eagle, which you can find onwinesearcher.com for a nifty $1,500 or so a bottle. I mean plenty of other producers whom I would love to have included, like Dominus, Diamond Creek, Continuum and Philip Togni, to name just a few.
While you can find some cut-rate Napa cabernets for around $20, most of those are intended for the mass market. Wines that are more reflective of the terroir and of producers’ styles start around $35 a bottle and escalate quickly. Napa producers consider these the entry-level bottles. The fact is, Napa Valley wines are not usually good values. Some exceptions exist, but often you are paying for the perceived status of Napa Valley. How you value that is up to you.
I’m not a big fan of the opulent, powerful style that has been dominant in Napa for the last 20 years or so. I find these sorts of wines fatiguing rather than refreshing, I don’t think they go well with food, they are complex in uninteresting ways and they don’t age particularly well.
At the same time, I love many Napa cabernets that adhere to time-tested notions of style, like Dominus and Diamond Creek, Mayacamas and Montelena, Corison and Kongsgaard, Heitz, Forman and Spottswoode. That’s one of the reasons I found this collection of 2011 cabernets so intriguing.
As a set, these were juicy, fresh wines rather than plush and syrupy. The best had earthy, mineral qualities not ordinarily associated with many Napa reds. They were wines that I could imagine drinking with gusto throughout a meal, and I think Patrick and Florence agreed with me.
“They’re brighter and fresher, with better acidity and not as dense,” said Patrick, who has an excellent selection of older Napa cabernets at Pearl & Ash. Florence found them to be “pleasant, even elegant.”
Paul has a few older Napa cabernets on his list at Hearth, and even a cult cabernet or two. But he was not so enthralled with our tasting.
“I like wine to tell a story,” he said. “These got no further than, ‘I am Sam, Sam I am.’ ”
Certainly, the weather forced many winemakers to tell a different story from the usual narrative of richness and impact. Instead of protecting their grape vines from the heat, they had to chase the warmth in an effort to get the grapes ripe enough for harvest. For many, the vintage was a knotty problem. If the success of the Napa Valley brand is tied to exuberant ripeness, what do you do when nature hands you something else?
The bottles we rejected were unable to find a satisfactory solution. Too many wines seemed disjointed, as if they were both underripe and overripe. We found odd combinations: tart yet sweet and oaky, tannic yet unstructured, herbal yet hot with alcohol. Luckily, we found more that we liked, beginning with our top bottle, the rich, dense yet beautifully balanced Grassi. Even Paul approved.
Close behind were a group of wines, beginning with Vineyard 29’s angular yet harmonious 2011 Cru. At $50, Cru is the budget entry among Vineyard 29’s several Napa cabernets. By contrast, the lively, complex Rivers-Marie and the tannic but nuanced Plumpjack Estate were the most expensive bottles in our tasting, just squeaking in under the cap at $90 and $99, respectively.
At the tail end of this group were two more moderately priced bottles, the earthy, spicy Chappellet Signature at $45 and the fresh, structured ZD, which was our best value at $40.
All told, 10 of the 20 bottles in our tasting were $37 to $50, yet seven of our favorites came from this group, while only three of the seven bottles costing $73 to $99 made our top 10. Too often, the more expensive the bottle, the more sweet oak is lavished on the wine, which, as they say, is fine for those who like that sort of thing.
If producers learned anything from the anomalous 2011 vintage, they have not had a chance to act on those lessons. The 2012 vintage was judged as ideal, and 2013 was more typically bright and hot. The 2011 wines may simply be odd ducks in a line of swans.
Yet I would have to disagree with Paul and argue that these wines do have a story to tell, at least collectively: When the weather switches up on you, do you embrace it and make wines that reflect the vintage? Or do you try to bend the wines to your will? From my point of view, harmonizing with nature wins out.
via:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/dining/napa-cabernets-from-a-cold-wet-year.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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