Wine and Spirits - December 2011 - (Page 8)

fined & filtered Napa Valley Cabernet A 2008 Vintage Report As Napa Valley’s 2008 cabernets were being released this year, comparisons to 2007 were inevitable. The mild, idyllic growing season of 2007 produced some stellar wines and was met with immediate acclaim. “2007 is one of those vintages when it was hard to make bad wine,” observes Paul Roberts, MS, who directs Bond Estates. The 2008 vintage was, by comparison, a wild ride. Erratic weather—frost, then heat spikes—plagued the vines early on in the growing season, reducing the crop from the outset. Tom Farella of Farella Vineyard in Coombsville reports that his cabernet yields were down by about 50 percent; some of his low-lying merlot blocks were so frost-damaged that they produced a meager half-ton per acre. It was also the third drought year in a row. In 2007, the canopy at Dominus’s dry-farmed Napanook Vineyard—just north of Coombsville in Yountville—was still green going into October. And the vines produced one of the best vintages of Dominus in the past decade. But in 2008, everything was yellow. It was a very challenging vintage, says Dominus’s technical director Tod Mostero, yet a rewarding one as well. “The 2008 vintage got a bad rap early on because the viticulturists and growers had a diﬃcult time,” comments Mostero. “But from a winemaker’s perspective the fruit was ideal.” One of Dominus’s lowest crops on record, 2008 produced small, concentrated berries. Loose clusters allowed the grapes to ripen evenly. While Dominus’s elegant 2007 is a cellar-worthy wine, Mostero and his team believe that the 2008 may outpace it in the long term. Farther up the valley, Bond Estates director Paul Roberts ﬁnds that the vintage pushed vineyards in unexpected directions. (With wines from ﬁve sites that stretch from Yountville to Spring Mountain, Bond oﬀers a particularly wide-ranging view of the vintage.) Roberts ﬁnds that Bond’s 2008 St. Eden, from a north-facing vineyard in Oakville, balances the site’s juicy fruit with a tactile mineral aspect that’s normally not as prominent. On the other hand, he notes that the vintage brought some unforeseen elegance to their Pluribus wine, from a Spring Mountain vineyard noted for its tannins. He attributes this to a Labor Day heat spike that ripened those tannins without pushing them into monolithic territory. Up on Diamond Mountain, at the northern end of the valley, the elevation allowed growers to largely avoid the frost that plagued the valley, though some vineyards did experience shatter due to nearfreezing temperatures. Rudy von Strasser estimates that his yields in By Luke Sykora 2008 were down by only about 15 percent. Diamond Creek’s Phil Ross reported that his yields were distinctly lower than normal, with small, drought-aﬀected berries producing concentrated wines. Scott Tracy, former wine director at Napa’s La Toque who now makes Napa Valley wines under the Poem Cellars label, points out that 2008’s Labor Day heat wave adversely aﬀected certain vineyards. Some growers responded to 2008’s cool temperatures with aggressive canopy management, only to run into sunburn problems when temperatures soared into the triple digits for several days in early September. “So there are going to be vineyard diﬀerences depending on the decisions people made,” he points out. “There’s probably going to be less reservetier wine in 2008.” But some of the best 2008s may be good enough to eclipse their 2007 counterparts. As a result, Bond’s Paul Roberts thinks that 2008 is going to be critically linked to the 2007 vintage: “It’s going to be one of those comparison vintages,” he says. So far at Wine & Spirits, we’ve given a slight edge to 2007. During 2010, we tasted 178 Napa Valley cabernets and blends from 2007, recommending 38 percent of them and scoring eight wines 94 points or higher. In 2011, we tasted 138 newly released 2008s, recommending 35 percent and scoring four wines 94 or points are higher. On a more qualitative note, Josiah Baldivino of Michael Mina in San Francisco ﬁnds that the 2007s as a whole tend to be more complete wines, with a ﬁne balance of acid, tannin and alcohol. He ﬁnds the 2008s to be somewhat more forward—“which, to a lot of people, is a good thing,” he adds. Tod Mostero of Dominus describes the diﬀerence between the two Dominus wines in terms of the tone of the fruit. He ﬁnds more blueblack fruit in the 2008, whereas the 2007 is more red-fruited. Paul Roberts distinguishes the two vintages based on their structure, ﬁnding that the 2008s fuse the ﬁrm tannins of Bond’s 2006 wines with the rich fruit of the winery’s 2007s. “The 2007s are 35- to 40-year wines. The 2008s are more 25- to 30-year wines,” he suggests, adding that the 2007 wines across the board tended to show a lot of baby fat early on, and may close down in the short term as they settle in for a long cellar life. I For more details on the vintage and for a report on Santa Cruz Mountains cabernet in 2008, go to wineandspiritsmagazine.com 8 W I N E & S P I R I T S D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 http://www.wineandspiritsmagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine and Spirits - December 2011

Wine and Spirits - December 2011
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered Luke Sykora on Napa's Latest Vintages; Wine Manga Hits Our Stores
Spirits: Winter's New Must-Haves from Lou Bustamante
Bordeaux on the Down Low
Post-Modern Barolo
Coombsville Rising
Breaking the Mold
Where’s the Beef?
Extreme Values
Tastings Overview
Champagne
American Cabernet & Blends
Barolo & Barbaresco
Rioja
German Riesling
American Wines
Imported Wines
Champagne’s Warming Trend

Wine and Spirits - December 2011