Howard - Mayacamas was sold, the vineyards are being replanted or were replanted, and the it’s no longer going to be made by Travers. Now that Banks is in jail, who knows?
Styles have shifted, a bit, being optimistic, being hopeful, from the mid-2000’s Parkerized excesses of ripeness and wood. A recent review of 2015 Macdonald by Roy Piper made me think.
There are several here who tasted the 70’s and 80’s Cali Cabs in their youth, and tasted the 2010-2015’s as well. That’s a lot of experience. I’m (relatively) young, and have yet to truly gain insight into what a young wine will taste like when it becomes a mature wine.
So the question: taking the recent vintages of 2012-2015, taking choice producers, from blue chips like Dominus and Opus One; to classicists like Corison, Forman, Togni, Dunn; to newer-but-respected winemakers like Mike Smith, Roy Piper, Aaron Pott, the Macdonalds etc… How do you compare their “ageability” to the great Cali cabs of yesteryear? To Contemporary Bordeaux? Has the paradigm shifted back towards wines that reward aging, or is that time basically behind us?
Noah - did you taste those wines from the 90s and 2000s? If not, how can you talk about Parkerized excess of ripeness and wood? And who calls who a classicist? Dunn is willing to admit to significant “manipulation” when making wine. Others claim they don’t.
And Bordeaux is even more of a generalization. It’s a huge area with many producers of many different quality levels and it’s pretty hard to talk about “contemporary Bordeaux” as a benchmark against which to measure something else. Do you mean a few specific houses in Pomerol or are we talking about something else?
And as far as a paradigm shifting, that’s essentially meaningless. Assuming that everyone once moved in lockstep and now they’re moving in lockstep in a different direction is simply not true. Also, nobody is going to shift away from something that makes money. So even if they had moved in lockstep at one time, which didn’t happen, if that resulted in higher prices and increased sales, they sure aren’t going to abandon that paradigm, whatever it is.
What has happened is that a lot of learning took place over the past forty years and in some cases it caused some changes, in other cases it was the result of changes. Bad choices of rootstock for example, caused replanting. That replanting resulted in the use of different scion clones, different rootstock clones, different cultivars, all of which resulted in different vineyard ages, different vineyard plotting, and the general ability to try doing things differently if one were so inclined.
Micro-oxygenation was invented in the early 1990s in France. In the mid-90s the EU adopted regulations allowing it. It became a tool in the US as well. Stainless steel was introduced in France in the 1960s, originally in Bordeaux as far as I know. But in the 1990s, some folks in Silicon Valley developed chips that allowed wine makers to monitor and regulate temperatures and sugar levels and make automated adjustments. Those tools didn’t really exist in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.
People through the 1980s and 1990s were investigating ways of determining ripeness. Sugar levels were an established method, but people were realizing that sugar alone didn’t necessarily result in the best grapes for wine, so they started talking about physiological ripeness, etc. Some people tasted the seeds and skins, others used laboratories.
The point is that a lot of tools have been developed over the past decades, as has a better understanding of grape and wine chemistry and plant management. So it’s not like anyone is going back to some imagined past pre-Parker, who BTW was a great boon to wine making world wide. If you want bretty wines, dirty wines, mediocre wines, look at what was produced in most regions of the world before Parker. And don’t blame Parker alone. Blame the folks at UC Davis, the University of Bordeaux Institute of Vine and Wine Science, Institut National d’Etudes Superieures Agronomiques de Montpellier, the Università di Torino, the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Eszterhazy Karoly University, and others.
As Wes said, different people are doing different things. There’s no paradigm shift because there’s no paradigm. People around the world share knowledge and experience. Even people trying to make their wines in the ways they believe their great grandfathers made the wines won’t be able to because they’re not going to use substandard grapes, they’re not going to pick as soon as there’s enough sugar to ferment because they’re afraid of birds and frost, they’re not going to eschew refrigeration, they’re not going to forego cleaning, etc. People can’t unlearn what they know and it would be foolish to try.
Can people make ageable wine? Sure and they’re doing it all over. Is there some kind of shift where wine makers are going to start telling customers not to drink their wine but to leave it for twenty years? Doubtful.
Mike Smith, Roy Piper, Aaron Pott, the MacDonalds - they’re all working with different material. The MacDonalds are working from their own land but they’re not making wine like Mondavi made in the 1980s. Neither is anyone else I can think of.
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