Cabernet sauvignon has been synonymous with Napa Valley red wine for as long as I can remember. Whether made as a single varietal wine or in a ‘Meritage’ blend with its Bordeaux counterparts, it remains the yardstick by which most contemporary Californian wineries judge themselves. Yet, just as we in Australia have our mainstream classics and our ‘cult’ wines, which wine is considered the best it depends very much on who, exactly, is doing the judging. On one hand recent developments in site selection, availability of quality rootstocks and a superior level of attention to detail in the winery are responsible for some astonishing Napa Valley cabernets. On the other, some highly questionable viticultural and harvesting practices, over-extraction, over-oaking, inadequate conservation and a poor understanding of what constitutes a balanced wine are responsible for a broad and often very expensive range of winemaking could-have-beens. The first group of wines is epitomised by wines like Beringer’s Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, Niebaum Coppola’s Rubicon, Heitz Cabernet Sauvignon, Clos du Val’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, Diamond Creek’s Volcanic Hill Cabernet Sauvignon and Ridge’s Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet. This group represents makers large and small and styles both firm and fine-grained. Each closely reflects their makers’ familiarity with the vineyards and fruit available to them and a clear knowledge of what constitutes classic wine. The second group, which includes a not insignificant number of high-profile and cult wines, reflect much the same winemaking approach that has seduced so many Australians as well. If anything, I think the media is even more to blame in the US, where certain critics have such power that an extraordinary number of wines are specifically made to please their palates. Thickness, concentration, extraction and extremely ripe fruit characters are in for these people, winemaking balance and finesse are out the window. During the 2000 vintage I was astonished to watch Napa Valley viticulturists risk leaving well-ripened fruit on the vine in the face of forthcoming poor weather in what I thought to be a questionable search for over-ripeness and shrivel. ‘Hang time’ is a phrase I had only previously associated with American golfing and gridiron commentary, but with many growers and makers it appears to be a viticultural prerequisite for some weird reason. Perhaps as a reaction to the squeaky-clean winemaking philosophies of the University of California at Davis (UCD), too many American winemakers are totally obsessed with absolute minimal handling and adjustment of wine, allowing into bottle wines of high pH, questionable stability, low preservative, over-ripe fruit and excessive extract. Despite the claims on their back labels, they don’t and won’t live long. Brettanomyces, a spoilage yeast, is so much a part of the scene there and winemakers are so accustomed to it that in certain cases they actively pursue it. Sink me! But therein lies a huge warning for Australian makers apparently only too willing to follow in their footsteps. These wines certainly won’t live as long as their often clumsy if robust predecessors from the 1970s and 1980s. Corralling together a stack of tasting notes of fine Californian cabernet sauvignon from the late 1970s to the present time, it’s possible to track the progress of this important wine. I am very happy to thank the editor-at-large of the Wine Spectator and baseball’s greatest fanatic, Harvey Steiman, for uncorking quite a number of these from his own cellar. The Tough Old Days Before 1983, when phylloxera re-appeared on the Californian wine scene, the differences between the cabernets made there were largely a reflection of terroir, although as a concept it was still some time before this was more precisely defined. There wasn’t much diversity in clonal planting material for either rootstocks or scions, vineyards were managed in much the same sort of a way, there wasn’t as much of a spectrum of winemaking philosophy as there is today and as far as oak is concerned, only a few wineries were using smaller casks in Bordeaux fashion. The principal difference between wines often came down to whether the fruit came from the valley floor or else from the more elevated ‘mountain’ vineyard sites, which first came to be planted back in the 1880s to heights up to 2,600 feet. These cooler and later sites have meaner and more marginal soils, are above the frost line and typically make wines with deeper, darker colours and more intense flavours. Typical of the better wines from the Napa Valley floor from this period, Beringer’s State Lane Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 1979 (18.2, drink 1999-2004), a precursor to the company’s Napa Valley Reserve label) is today a big, sweet chocolatey and leathery New World style whose rich, once firm tannins have finally softened to their present level of approachability. From Rutherford on the valley floor, Caymus’ Napa Valley Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon 1979 (18.0, drink 1991-1999) spent four years in 60 gallon casks and although it’s beginning to break up, is today a more lean, savoury and astringent wine with hard-edged tannins, pencil shavings and aniseed characters. From the same vintage comes the Santa Cruz Mountains Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon 1979 (18.6, drink 2009+) , a wine of massive density and power whose intensely focused black cherry fruit, dusty and smoky oak and firm, youthful tannins suggest considerable improvement still to come, from a 22 year-old wine! Superbly balanced and just marginally herbaceous, it provides a remarkable contrast to the previous two wines and highlights the exceptional qualities of mountain fruit. Tending towards the leathery and over-cooked, wines like the Cuvaison Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 1981 (16.7, drink 1993-2001) still retain powerful hard-edged tannins and display mature leathery flavours, but their fruit flavour spectrum of plums and prunes tends to suggest that they were picked over-ripe. Robert Mondavi’s Napa Valley Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 1981 (18.0, drink 1993-2001) was one of the earliest to be given substantial maturation in small French oak. Although it’s still pretty overt and impactful, with slightly sappy tannins, its autumnal evolution of flavours, cigarboxy development and presence of sweet red and black berry fruits stamps it as a landmark of its time. From Stag’s Leap and the same vintage, the Martin Ray Napa Valley Steltzner Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 1981 (18.8, drink 1993-2001+) was made with a philosophy more akin to the more adventurous winemakers of today. It’s intoxicatingly perfumed with earthy, funky complexity and presents a sweet, focused core of dark cherries and prunes. Its tannins are remarkably soft and tight given the period and its balance is exceptional. Another step up the evolutionary ladder. Talking to the Vineyards Since 1984 Ed Sbragia has been Beringer’s chief winemaker. He’s participated in the modern evolution of Californian cabernet and in my opinion shows a touch of rare deftness and sensitivity with respect to two of the most crucial elements of making fine cabernet – balance and tannin management. Sbragia started with the company in 1976 and 1979 he was joined by viticulturist Bob Steinhauser in a partnership that has produced the company’s first-rate Private Reserve wine programme. ‘Number one is to get the right grape in the right place’, says Sbragia. ‘In the early 1970s and late 1960s we had a lot of grapes planted in the wrong place, but in the late 1970s and 1980s we were fortunate enough to get some good cabernet sauvignon vineyards early.’ One was Knights Valley, located nearly 30 km north of the winery at St Helena, whose soils are volcanic and well-drained. The other was Chabot, whose hillside vineyards enriched with obsidian are found on the eastern slopes of the Napa Valley near St Helena and produce low, concentrated and minty cabernets. Sbragia’s role model in the early days of the Private Reserve concept was Caymus’ Martha’s Vineyard, and in Chabot he believed he had a vineyard which fitted that mould. Beringer slowly accumulated more vineyards of similar qualities, making some massive, but balanced wines. Found at an elevation on 1,800 feet on Howell Mountain, Bancroft Ranch Vineyard was planted in 1983 and acquired by Beringer in 1986. It’s become a key component of the company’s best red wines and today contributes between 40-60% of the Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. To paraphrase their virtues, one could say that companies like Beringer use mountain fruit for its depth and strength, valley floor fruit for its richness and sweetness. ‘One of things I learned early on was that great red wine is made in the vineyard. The rest is like falling off a log. If you get good barrels and get the extraction just right, you end up with a wine that is fairly balanced and that doesn’t require a lot of manipulation. You might need some racking, but no real aeration, and the wine will take a couple of years to equilibriate in oak’, he explains, rather modestly. ‘After twenty-two months most of our wines are ready to come out of barrels and by then they’re usually stable. If I’ve done a good job, I’ll just need a coarse filtration.’ The Phylloxera Opportunity In 1983 the first signs of phylloxera’s re-emergence in the Napa Valley began to appear, apparently in a very much more avaricious form (Biotype B) than that which initially wiped the valley out in the previous century. Since the 1950s UCD had chosen to recommend the hybrid rootstock AxR for all vineyard plantings and by the 1960s it had become the dominant, almost exclusive rootstock in the state. By 1985 its use was being questioned and by 1989 Davis finally officially recognised its link to the emergent problem. Biotype B’s spread across the state forced another wave of replanting. On the surface this might be considered a disaster, and it was unquestionably the cause of much heartache and financial loss. But the silver lining was that the necessary replanting actually created a new and unparalleled opportunity for growers to match precisely their rootstocks with their varieties with their desired cropping levels, their soils and aspect. Given that replanting on this scale takes time, it is only now that some of the redeveloped vineyards are coming back into yield. I have no reason to doubt the claims of many winemakers that these vineyards are on the verge of producing their best wines ever. And once these vineyards reach around ten years of age we’ll really see what they’re capable of. The mid-1980s saw the continuation of the more powerful expressions of Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, although exceptional wines like the muscular Caymus Napa Valley Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon 1985 (18.7, drink 1997-2005+) and the smoky, smooth and lightly herby Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 1987 (18.5, drink 1999-2007) reveal a better understanding of tannins, both in terms of ripeness in the vineyard and management during fermentation. According to Ed Sbragia, Beringer discovered that during their replantings that they had a multitude of wrong grapes in the wrong place, but by re-establishing these sites more thoughtfully and moving to tighter spacings and vertical trellising that the vineyards are better than ever before. And, as we’ve seen in Australia, moving away from the old ‘California sprawl’ approach to canopy management has resulted in a tighter range of ripeness, with less of the greenish under-ripe and jammy over-ripe characters noticeable in older Californian cabernets. At the same time, the quality of tannins has improved markedly. Today the better Napa Valley viticulturists are using the combination of rootstock and scion clone to naturally create balanced yields on their vineyards. Sbragia argues that his approach produces the optimal flavour, which is his main harvest criterion. From quality vineyards established this way he tends to harvest cabernet sauvignon in the high 13s and low 14s in terms of Baume level, while typically harvesting merlot at slightly higher levels than cabernet sauvignon in any particular vintage to avoid the grassy elements of its flavour spectrum. No wine expresses this approach more clearly than Beringer’s Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon from 1991 (19.3, drink 2003-2011), an aristocratic and supremely elegant wine whose alluring, deep scents and flavours of dark red and black berries are evolving towards the cigarboxy and cedary, and whose tannins are perfectly tight and fine-grained. Showing similar touch with tannin is the rather brooding Chateau Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon 1994 (18.7, drink 2006-2014), which slowly opens to reveal deeply complex floral and earthy aromas and a wonderfully long, supple and willowy palate culminating in tight-knit astringency. Sbragia scores again with the Beringer Private Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon from 1995, a sumptuous and vibrant long-living wine (19.2, drink 2015+) which opens with layer after layer of dense cassis fruit, smoky chocolate oak, cedar and firm, astringent yet typically soft and supple tannins. Similarly constructed, oozing style and restrained power, is Clos du Val’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon from 1996, a silky-smooth and sophisticated wine (19.1, drink 2008-2016+) with musky, meaty smallgoods-like complexity, explosively intense fruit and cedary oak. Talented winemaker Scott McLeod created an exceptional Rubicon blend of red Bordeaux varieties for Niebaum Coppola in 1996 (19.1, drink 2008-2016). Weighing in at a respectable 14.1% alcohol, it’s plush and fleshy, almost cuddly. Vibrant in its expression of raspberry, cassis and dried cherry fruit, it’s beautifully elegant and polished, with a background of cedary oak (60% French), tight-knit fine tannins and an undercurrent of dark, ripe, penetrative fruit. Again, a modern wine which eloquently expresses the qualities of its fruit, without over-ripeness and over-extraction and which is both pristine and clean. It will acquire its greatest complexity with time in the bottle, not through over or under-winemaking. Keen to preserve its stamp and its heritage, Silver Oak continues to mature its Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon in 100% American oak, a la Penfolds Bin 707 with which it is similarly priced. The 1996 vintage (18.6, drink 2008-2016+) is long and tight-knit, with a coating of fine, powdery and drying tannins. Its excellent length of cassis, maraschino cherry and raspberry fruit finishes firm, dry and savoury. Clos Pegase is an emergent and no-expenses-spared operation whose Homage Bordeaux blend from 1997 (18.7, drink 2009+) also expresses the savoury fineness and elegance apparently so often shunned by much of the US wine media. Ed Sbragia is crucially aware of the dangers of harvesting cabernet too ripe and creating a hot-tasting wine. ‘If it tastes hot, the wine is not big enough. If it has flavour and intensity and viscosity, the alcohols and tannins are not too obvious, the acids are not obvious and all is in balance. If the alcohol is naturally high it sticks out due to a lack of balance. If the acid is way too high it too can stick out, even if there’s plenty of alcohol. With cabernet it all depends on those grapes’, he states. Like most of his peers at the quality end of the market, Sbragia keeps each vineyard block separate in the winery. ‘The idea of cooking up a wine is pretty much gone’, he says. ‘We’ve now got some great techniques for making wine, and everybody’s listening and looking and tasting, focusing back on each vineyard. We listen to the vineyards, and find that if we do that, they’ll talk back to you.’ If it isn’t already, the time is surely nigh when Australian wine collectors will need to take Californian cabernet sauvignon very seriously indeed. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that without too many exceptions, they can show us a thing or two.
