Wine & Spirits - December 2013 - (Page 8)

FINED& filtered Hot & Cold: The 2010 Napa Cabernets Tod Mostero, the estate director at Dominus, calls 2010 "the most difficult vintage I've ever seen." Things started off cool and wet, and stayed cool throughout most of the summer. While an average year brings a number of highs over 100 degrees by mid-August, in 2010 most summer days didn't even push 90. (Typical for Napa, nights were cool, with lows around 50). Until the even colder 2011, it stood out as the coolest Napa vintage in recent memory. "The good wines will be based on experience." -Elias Fernandez, winemaker, Shafer Vineyards But that's not the whole story. August 24th threw a wrench into the works: with vineyards already well into veraison, an intense heat wave hit Napa. The thermometer at Dominus's Napanook Vineyard- in Yountville, not one of Napa's warmest pockets-hit 106.8 degrees. Most vineyards throughout the valley, especially those that had already been thinned of leaves to promote ripening, experienced severe sunburn. In some cases the heat was intense enough to scorch the rachis (the connection between the cluster and the shoot), killing off entire clusters. The cabernet franc at Napanook was hit particularly hard, and for the first time in over 20 years, Dominus was made without any cabernet franc. "It wasn't just the heat spike," Mostero says. "It was the warm, dry conditions of September and October, and vines that were trying to react to those warm temperatures. You didn't really get a nice, slow ripening; you got a lot of herbal notes from things not being completely ripe, and then cooked notes. It gave you something kind of complex, but from the addition of herbal and cooked. Beyond that, it gave you very high tannins and very high color. It was sort of flashy, dark, deep." For growers who had the luxury of being selective, underripeness wasn't much of an issue despite the tepid weather, and raisined berries could be sorted out. Maybe fearing overly austere wines, some winemakers seem to have plumped up their wines by leaving a bit of residual sugar. But the more carefully made, site-driven wines of the vintage are impressively structured and often driven by savory earth tones as much as overt fruit, suited to a long evolution in the cellar. The vintage certainly played into Cathy Corison's hand. Her cabernet is grown exclusively on the warm, The more carefully made, site-driven wines of the vintage are impressively structured and often driven by savory earth tones as much as overt fruit, suited to a long evolution in the cellar. 8 WINE & SPIRITS DECEMBER 2013 cobbly benchlands of western Rutherford and St. Helena. Her sites (and a philosophy of picking at lower sugars compared to many of her Napa counterparts) meant that she didn't have a problem bringing in ripe fruit in 2010. Like most everyone else, she had to deal with sunburn, sending out crews the day before harvest to literally scrape off the raisined sides of damaged clusters. Still, it's the coolness of the year, more than the heat, that shows through in her 2010 Napa Valley Cabernet. "It's concentrated and it does have that mineral quality that I love-I think that comes from the long, cool season," Corison says. (See page 62 for our critic's take on the wine.) In other areas of Napa, despite the August heat wave and some warmer days in September and October, ripeness wasn't a given. As veraison hit, the team at Shafer was concerned about their Borderline Vineyard, at the cool southern

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - December 2013

Wine & Spirits - December 2013
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered
Acid Trips
The Great Whiskey Shortage of 2013
Spirits
Gadgets and Gi
New Destinations
Where to Eat & Drink in Seattle
Turning Champagne into Wine
Barolo & Formaggio
Douro, No Apologies
Walla Walla Cabernet
The Best for $10 or Less
Overview
Champagne
US Sparkling Wine
US Cabernet Sauvignon
Alsace
German Riesling
2011 Vintage Port
Barolo & Barbaresco
Rioja
US New Releases
International New Releases
Wine & Spirits Top 100

Wine & Spirits - December 2013