Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 77

Cabernet Sauvignon
by Joshua Greene

Say cabernet today and many Americans think Napa Valley. For centuries, however, it's home has been Bordeaux. You won't see it on the
label, but cabernet sauvignon is often the majority of the blend in the
great wines of the Médoc.
Back in the 19th century, it was just one voice in the
chorus of grapes that made up the region's top wines.
But after phylloxera, the American vine-root louse,
devastated Bordeaux's vineyards in the late 1800s,
cabernet was the vine that adapted best to the phylloxera-resistant rootstock the Bordelais imported
from the US, while those foreign roots crippled other
local varieties. The deep gravel bars of the Gironde
continued to produce the region's most acclaimed
wines, though the blends shifted away from malbec
and carmenère to focus on cabernet sauvignon.
Even as the Bordelais have come to rely on the
variety for their most long-lived wines, it was the
New World that made cabernet sauvignon famous-
specifically Napa Valley, where the vine settled in the
19th century. The long, narrow valley that directs the
Napa River to the San Pablo Bay has its own rocky
parallels to the gravel mounds of the Gironde. Here,
the stony depths are the work of erosion, as water
coursed down from the mountains on either side of
the valley, fanning out and creating benches of rocky
soils at the edges of those volcanic hills. Gustave Niebaum farmed one of those rocky benches of cabernet sauvignon to produce the early vintages of Inglenook in the 1880s; his grandnephew, John Daniel, Jr.,
farmed another, at Napanook in Yountville, now the
home of Dominus. And Robert Mondavi, when he
established his winery in 1966, settled at what was
among the most famous of those benchland cabernet sauvignon sites, To Kalon, in Oakville.
That was still long before cabernet sauvignon
became the dominant variety in the valley. It would
take another bout with phylloxera, which hit in the
1990s, for cabernet sauvignon to rise to the near
monocultural status it holds today in Napa Valley. By
the time many growers were forced to replant their
vines, cabernet sauvignon was already fetching the
highest prices of any variety in the valley. So it was

an economic incentive, along with the strong identity Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon had acquired,
that led to cabernet's dominance in the region today.
Napa wasn't the only place growers planted cabernet sauvignon; the status of Bordeaux wines led
any number of ambitious growers to plant the vine,
whether or not the site was appropriate to the grape.
Eventually, they found sweet spots for the variety in
the Pacific desert of California-in the Santa Cruz
Mountains in the 19th century, where it thrived in
high-elevation vineyards, and in Sonoma's Alexander Valley, on the western side of the Mayacamas
Mountains. Even if the climate might hold few parallels to Bordeaux's Atlantic maritime, it turns out that
ocean fog can be a more reliable cooling factor for
the vines of California's North Coast than the lateseason rain that might either refresh or devastate a
ripening crop in the Médoc.
Is it only a coincidence that most of the great cabernet sauvignon vineyards are close to the western
edge of a continent, facing the sea? Think of Sassicaia, in Bolgheri, on Tuscany's west coast, or the vineyards of Puente Alto and Pirque in the Alto Maipo,
the foothills of the Andes on Chile's Pacific coast,
or Margaret River, a town of surfers and cabernet
sauvignon growers, where Western Australia meets
the Indian Ocean.
More than most varieties, cabernet sauvignon has
the ability to sustain its own distinct identity while
taking on facets of each of these different cultures,
whether from the people or the place. So if you enjoy
the richness of Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, you
may well find some Bordeaux that suits you, especially if you buy in the ripest vintages. And if you love
the cool elegance of Bordeaux, there are nooks and
corners of the New World-particularly on western
coasts-that can deliver cabernet sauvignon with a
similar grace.

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