Vinous/Tanzer retrospective 2007 Ca Cabs

Anyone here a Vinous subscriber? Tanzer wrote a provocative piece about some 2007 cabs not aging very gracefully. Don’t really want to invest the $$ to go behind the paywall, but I am curious about the wines he feels are showing some unpleasant age wrinkles. Any surprises?

Well, that’s why they charge for the information. You want a paycheck when you go to work, right? They want to get paid for their work too.

Look, I am not asking for a reprint of the article, just discussing 2007s with a bit or two of info. This is not unusual, bits and pieces of stuff from the Parker boards have been chewed over on Berserkers with no significant impact on their business model. I suspect the healthy discussion of aging Calif cabs might produce more interest and generate traffic on their site. After all, I only found out about the existence of the retrospective after Antonio tweeted out the intro to Tanzers article…for all the world to read! If everything behind the paywall is off limits, then those rascally retailers should stop lifting reviews of wines and putting them on retail offers.

Better if forumites share their own experiences on the California Cabernet Sauvignon-led wines of the 2007 vintage. We often focus too much on the pronouncements of critics.

Posted at the same time Ian!

What he said. You could probably ask for opinions on those wines here and you’d get more info. Maybe better.

Agree, but it is fun to compare and contrast. Would be nice to know if those critical predictions of 8years ago have any substance, or are just educated guesses, like we all have. Drinking windows anyone? These always seem to be the least reliable pieces of critic reviews.

Just had 2007 Insignia on Sunday night. A lovely wine that is coming along very well. Balanced, with solid fruit backbone and a spine of oak that hints at solid aging.

Ian, I enjoy getting to hear the sentiments of critics. While I’ve had dozens of 2007 Napa cabs, I’ve had no opportunity for a 10 years-after horizontal retrospective of the scope had by our friends at Vinous. Their takes, therefor, offer a breadth that my single palate is incapable of offering. Better to have one measuring stick than 50 since wine commentaries from 50 different palates. I can at least compare my experiences with the critics to determine similarities in taste. If present, I have a reasonable idea of what to expect from wines I’ve not yet had and not yet purchased. That’s fine assistance with future purchases. If my take and the critic’s take are materially different on identical wines, I’ll look elsewhere for commentary. No harm no foul.

I’m getting so weary of the over-the-top distaste for the professional wine critics. Sure, WA scores can be over-the-top. We’ve all read/heard that. But, why wouldn’t reading the impressions of a wine professional who has tasted many, many, many wines in his career be useful? While I certainly agree that his board would likely generate a good amount of useful information as well, I think there is a lot to be potentially learned and enjoyed by reading Galloni’s article. If you think he overscores wines, take the scores and TNs in context of each other, and forget them as stand-alone reference points. What wines in this tasting did he prefer over the others, and why? He tasted a very large swath of wines, too, so it wasn’t a concentrated example of only the “top tier” CA Cabs. I thought it was quite informative and a good read.

Lol I had tthe opposite reaction. I like Tanzer but I found the wine choices to be terrible. A small group of the most expensive napa wines (bond, screagles, crow, verite, et al) and a bunch of mainstreet napa cabs that people pay 25 bucks a tasting for. Very few wines in that report I was interested in and Napa cabs are still my largest holding. The notes didnt really match the ratings of wines in the upper 80s and low 90s imho. Not his best effort.

Interesting to read, especially since he acknowledged that many (but not most) producers went overripe with “roasted” fruit or “port-like” flavors, and then went on to give decent scores to these wines.
Mostly the cults at the top, as you’d expect.

If people like the critics and wish to follow them, then it doesn’t take much to stump up the cash to do so.

The forum can add their own opinions about specific wines if asked.

One thing I found odd was his statement that “the Oakville weather station recorded a total of just three inches of rain between the beginning of March and end of September; 2007 was the first of two consecutive drought years.”

As a former Northern Californian, I shrugged at that figure because there is virtually no rain across the six summer months in Napa. The average for that span is 4.9 inches, but normally 2.5 inches of that comes in March. The average for April to September is just 2.4 inches, and many years it’s less. So his total probably just reflects a dry March.

I smell an offline…

This is not at all what he said.

On the 2007 Phelps Insignia, he writes: “Saturated dark ruby!”
I know he always likes to describe the color first, but it really struck me as funny to put an exclamation mark on that sentence.

Here’s his summary, from the portion outside the paywall at the link Arv gave above:

My verdict: not to worry. The better ‘07s are beautiful, sleek Napa Valley examples with outstanding density, glorious fruit and excellent equilibrium. Yes, the wines are ripe and powerful, but as they absorb their baby fat they are gaining in shape and definition. And they are evolving very slowly. I seldom make gross generalizations about vintage quality and then only under duress, but 2007 certainly numbers among Napa Valley’s top four or five vintages of the 21st century. That said, lesser producers have the uncanny ability to underperform even in the best years, and there were many disappointing wines in my 2007 tastings. I should note that my previous horizontal tastings (of vintages 2005, 2004, 1995 and 1994) were by invitation only, but this year all member wineries of Napa Valley Vintners were eligible to participate. The larger group of wines included a few real discoveries but also explains why I tasted more than three dozen wines that did not make the cut for this article (i.e., I rated them lower than 85 points). And to my palate, more of these disappointing wines were unpleasantly green, bitter-edged, overextracted, excessively tannic, clumsily acidified, oxidative, volatile or dried by oak than chunky or over the top.

Maybe he meant, “Saturated dark ruby+”

On the few wines I own, I was struck by the significantly lower rating than his original reviews.

For the most part, I could care less about what the world thinks of most Cali cabs, as I don’t seem to need them. Steve reviews and is familiar with many cali wines. I don’t know how much he still loves them. I had a brief chat with Steve when he was in Seattle this summer about the wine world, and he was not surprised that few people in Washington buy Cali cabs and bordeaux blends. I know he owns a bunch of Washington wines that he follows and loves. Why not buy top Washington wines for 1/4-1/3 of the price?