I was wondering if you could help me with a little tasting I wanted to put together for a couple friends.
I drink very little California wine, and of what I do drink, a marginal amount is Napa cab or bordeaux blends. I’d like to try to appreciate this style of wine while comparing it to classic bordeaux, so that I can better understand what wines I do and don’t care for.
We’ll only be three or four people, so I’d like to limit it to four bottles max. The benchmark Napa Cab I picked up was a 2004 Philip Togni Cabernet as an example of a leaner napa style. I’d ideally like one more Napa wine, possibly in a different style. I was then thinking of putting up two bordeaux of similar age and price point–2000 Nenin, 2004 Clos de Sarpe, 2002 Calon Segur, 2006 La Lagune, and 2004 Rauzan Selga are all bottles I’ve picked up recently which I have not tasted. Preferably I’d serve one St. Emilion, one St. Julien or St. Estephe, and one Graves for variation.
Any suggestions would be incredibly appreciated, as I have not done a tasting like this before and would love to select my wines productively so that we all have some things to discuss and learn a bit from the evening too. Thanks!
If you want two radically different interpretations of CA Cabernet, buy a bottle of Rombauer/Caymis Napa Valley Cabernet (Modernist, Over-the-Top) and a bottle of Ridge Estate Cabernet (Traditionalist)
Kind of unclear what you’re trying to accomplish? I.e., do you want California wines that are closer to the Bordeaux style, or that are “mainstream” Cali Cabernet? Honestly, you won’t find anything (I mean anything) from California that comes close to the wines you’ve listed, in those vintages. You’ve got producers that tend toward more reserved, structured wines, in two vintages that are leaner and less ripe to begin with. Any California wine you put next to those is going to be completely (and obviously) different.
You have a variation of vintages and it’s not clear what you’re trying to show. I’ve done many tastings like this but it’s best if you pick some good Bordeaux vintages as Napa tends to be OK more often than Bordeaux. Then if you’re comparing regions instead of countries, you’d stick to Napa vs Bordeaux rather than taking in all of CA.
Togni is a good one. Dunn, Corison, Mayacamas, Spottswoode, come to mind, but you can also include something like Insignia, which used to win a lot of these kinds of tastings, or Caymus, which will be wildly different from anything out of Bordeaux but shouldn’t be taken as the archtype Napa wine. BV George Latour used to be an example of an elegant example of Napa, maybe not so much these days.
And there are dozens of other producers, depending on what you want to accomplish.