Yet another thread on the ageability of California Cabs

WINE TALK
21

Great post by GregT- thank you for that.

For my reply to the OP, I will assume we are talking about the top of the line wines and focus the question strictly on what I would call “classic ageability”- or the desire to create a wine that will develop new and special secondary and tertiary characteristics with time, perhaps at the expense of not being as forward in youth.

The wine market at the top end is so large now that you have room for both the “fruit bombs” and the more classically restrained wines.

As I have noted on this forum before, a few years ago I appraised a wine cellar that was included in the sale of a house. It was a large list of CA wines I had never heard of. With extensive research I determined most were extremely expensive and truly mailing-list-only (and then auction in the secondary market) wines. Where critical TNs were available, they were mid to upper 90s with all the descriptors we generally associate with what are usually called “big modern wines”. In the last few years, a whole new generation of micro-wineries has filled out this niche where point score and rarity seem to be the primary drivers that encourage ownership. And as I noted, it is an extremely exclusive market- limited largely to the West Coast and a few cities like Austin with strong West Coast ties in terms of the economic elite.

But also there are many buyers who would like more restrained wines. Not just wines that will age, but will be harmonious with a meal. Aside from wisely learning from and using new technology as it comes available, I think a lot of the wineries that have been like this from day 1- Dunn, Corison etc., are continuing in their current vein.

However, demand is definitely up for the more “classic” wines. Not too long ago you could walk into a high end wine store in Texas and always find a couple of vintages (or more) of Dunn on the shelf. Not anymore. Current vintage only at best. Corison- similar story. Where you used to be able to get the current vintage fairly easily, I have not seen it sitting on a store shelf in quite some time. Diamond Creek and Heitz are also making a comeback. Rarely stocked for several years- now they are starting to be available here again like I have not seen since the late 90s, and they sell through pretty quickly given their price points.

I have also noted a number of newer players which are now faring quite well with a more balanced and long term cellaring approach. It is hard to broadly define the region by it, but among serious wine collectors there is a trend toward appreciation of the general intent of winemaking prior to the creation of the wider mass luxury market.

Now- as GregT noted- Dunn is a good example of a wine that is ageworthy but also quite manipulated. But the fact remains in terms of outcome it is seen as “old school”, and demand for such wines has definitely increased quite a bit in recent years. I think in large part as a replacement to Bordeaux FWIW.

As for direct comparisons with decades ago, that is very difficult. I have only on a few occasions attended vertical tastings where several decades of a wine were compared- and the answer is that even among the most stubbornly “traditional” Bordeaux chateaux there are still so many things that change in that length of time that it is very difficult to look at a younger vintage and say it is likely to come out just like a vintage from 4 decades ago is tasting now. When comparing wines within a 10-20 year period, the comparisons come much easier- though are usually with regard to a specific characteristic or two. When you really look back, though, you will discover the few common threads that make the core of a wine’s long term mission statement- but find it very difficult to think that the young wines on the table are ever going to be very close matches to the mature ones.

(Note, I have only been tasting wine for 23 years- in another 20, my opinion may change as I have the chance to see couple more decades of vintages mature.)

22

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23

Yes, great post Greg.

You mean there isn’t simply a “Parkerize” switch on each barrel that can be flipped on or off? Who knew winemaking was so complicated? Who knew?

24

Exactly. No one on that list, or anyone else in Napa as far as I am aware, is making wines that are really at all similar to those of the '60s-'80s. The more recent wines are extremely different, especially from the late '90s on.

I didn’t read the question comparing agability as yes/no. As different as the modern wines are, there’s no question that they will age differently from those of the past. I think the question of in what ways is just starting to be answered. As far as the question of for how long, no one knows for sure at this point. It is interesting to discuss, but it’s mostly guesswork at this point. I’d say the same is true for most, if not all, high end Bordeaux to varying degrees.

25

Doesn’t exactly answer the OP’s question but I took a '93 Dunn Howell Mountain to a Memorial Day party and it showed wonderfully. Used to be that 25 years didn’t feel like enough time for those wines, but this one had had plenty of time. Still has 5 years to go, maybe 10, though I’m not convinced it will get a lot better.

That said, I’ve had a ton of California cabs from the '70s and '80s, along with a handful from the '60s and '50s, and I would say they have been remarkably long-lived and enjoyable. I will be surprised if the current big-and-ripe winemaking style does as well, but you never know.

Next up for me is a bunch of 1991 CA cabs. For me, the first great year from the '90s, and better when they came out than any vintages from the '80s. I’ll be interested to see how they’re doing.

26

One of the modernizing moves was to uniform ripeness. Narrow fruit zones, then more stringent sorting. That plays well to a certain elegant, polished style, but at the cost of complexity. There were holdouts, of course. Now we’re seeing more people moving to a broader ripeness range on purpose. Moving back from an over-correction. Getting the range from red to black in there, some of the peak aromatics, some fullness, good natural acidity, it can be like a great blend, but all from the same vines.

27

Great post, Greg - succinctly laid out most points I was going to make.

There is simply no way to compare the wines of ‘yesteryear’ with the wines of today. Everything has changed - and there’s no turning back. Think of oak that is now used for many of the wines of today - the toasting / air drying / manufacturing is different now than it was before, allowing for ‘different’ extraction.

As Greg pointed out, think of ‘temperature control’ during fermentation to ‘dial in’ exactly what you want to extract and when from the must.

Think of the ‘tools’ that exist today - do you think winemakers 40 years ago were able to send their wines out to a lab pre-fermentation that would be able to tell them how much nitrogen they had in their must prior to fermentation kicking off so as to avoid stuck fermentations?

And one more major thing to consider - what if these ‘age beautifully’ but your tastes change and you don’t ‘like them’ anymore as many on this board seem to do over time?

So many factors - but fun discussion points indeed.

Cheers!

28

Addressing that, what kind of ‘grape or cluster’ sorting used to take place 40 years ago? Did they have a belt that ran at 1/2 ton/acre and have 20 hands around it, picking out anything that ‘wasn’t perfect’? They certainly did not have optical sorters that are used to do throughout Bordeaux and starting to show up more and more over here.

We can talk all we want about ‘terroir’, but as winemakers are going through grapes and clusters with a ‘fine toothed comb’, knocking out anything ‘that is not perfect’, one can make the argument that this is assisting in moving away ‘from what the vineyard provided’ and into ‘aiming for perfection’ when that term, as it relates to producing wine, simply does not exist . . .

Cheers.

29

[scratch.gif] That has the tone, like you think you’re saying anything different than what I just did… [scratch.gif]

30

I assume that both human and machine sorters can tell a rotten grape from a good one, with the machine probably having greater sensitivity as well as being faster.

But what about ripeness? I would think humans can’t tell how ripe a grape is by looking at it, outside of fairly obvious extremes. Are optical sorters better at this? Can they be set to detect and accept grapes within variable windows of ripeness? Does a wider range of ripeness reliably result in more complexity with aging or better balance?

So many variables to play with!

31

This is huge in terms of what kind of fruit you get and the resulting wine. Also, note that many vineyards were replanted due non-phylloxera resistant rootstock and then sharpshooter so the vegetative material is different now.

32

I think the winemakers have to adapt to the grapes they have. Many of the vintages of the 70’s and 80’s were much less ripe. Increased heat has increased ripeness leading to higher alcohol wines. Can’t really change that. Will the really big wines age well? Somewhere around the mid-90’s styles seemed to change. Maybe it was Parker, maybe it was just global warming. Time will be the only marker.

33

Some of those cult producers are using optical sorters to eliminate every single berry that isn’t optimal ripeness. There’s much better than people.

With a greater range of ripeness, that should give you a sort of all-of-the-above. (And, within the parameters of your choosing, by customizing the training. And you still have sorting.) You have enough material that has the stuff to age well. You have the range of red to purple to black fruit. You have enough acid. You have floral aromatics that can be lost with ripening. You have fuller flavor and texture, filling things out. Maybe think a mesh of vertical and horizontal components, if that makes sense, where a lot of wines are mostly one or the other. A good example would be Mount Eden Cab.

34

Actually the vertical and horizontal component concept makes a lot of sense.

Individual winemakers have discernible trends over time - eg increasing oak usage at Ridge for MB - and regions/markets have trends, whether they are financially driven, critically driven, climatically driven, etc.

Noah - that’s very true. But at the same time, the number of producers in the world has exploded. For example, in 1982 the DO of Ribera del Duero was created. There were 9 bodegas at the time that produced their own wine. Most of the rest of the grapes went to co-ops. Thirty years later there are around 300 wineries there and almost five times the acreage. Most of the wines were crap. Today they include some of the best in the world. Sometime in the very early 1990s Parker became aware of the place. There were a lot of young wineries looking for a market and in some cases they took their cues from him and crafted wines in a way that they thought he might like.

That’s just not the case today. They’re more confident, more experienced, more aware of trends world wide, more aware of what their competition is, and more willing to take chances with different wine making techniques. The question of aging actually does come up and with the exception of a few like Vega Sicilia and Pesquera, there aren’t a lot of data points for how the wines age at the 30 and 40 year mark, but I suspect many of them will age gracefully for many years.

That’s a relatively small area and there are constraints on what grapes can be grown there, but I picked it because it’s a proxy for what happened world wide.

California is bigger and has no constraints and has basically gone through the same thing. Guys like Wes and Larry and Roy know a lot more about the wine making out there, but it’s certainly evolved during the time I’ve been looking at it. Pax Mahle is an example. He’s become a pretty adventurous wine maker, having started as a guy making big, rich Syrah. Larry is trying all sorts of things, and Wes is involved in some really cool projects. I don’t want to speak for them but I think they’re learning with every vintage. Some wines will age, some won’t, but I think the point is less about aging than discovery of what’s possible.

And tannins aren’t the only reason to age a wine, or even the primary reason. If you have rough tannins and hope a few years will soften them, you may be lucky and find that to be the case. That’s likely true with a lot of the older wines from Piedmont, Bordeaux, and even Napa. But in some cases those tannins never really softened. You just lost fruit and had crappy wine. But you age a wine to improve it, whether or not it’s tannic as hell. There are plenty of wines that don’t have harsh tannins but that age beautifully - some Zins, some Barbera, a lot of wines from Rioja, some Sangiovese, and I’m sure there are more.

I think the answer to your question is not that a paradigm has shifted, but that the choices are so much greater and you can now select from a much wider set of possibilities, depending on what you’re interested in. World wide, I don’t think people have moved away from making wines that will improve with age. So that era is not behind us.

At the same time, I can’t think of many wines that are made the way they would have been made in the early 1980s. However, I’d bet on some Cali Cabs aging nicely.

35

GregT, all good points. Like I said, I am crowdsourcing opinions. I have bought a bunch of Cabs and Cab Blends that I have found enjoyable young, eg Myriad and Rivers-Marie, and some that I have tried just for fun but are just too young to drink, like Monte Bello, and some that i wouldn’t consider touching based on reputation (Corison, Forman, Opus, Dominus). There are many producers whose styles I just don’t know well enough to predict, from Dakota Shy and DiCostanzo to Bevan. And a lot in between. It is VERY hard to get a bead on the styles and ageabilities of newer projects. No one quite comes out and says that they want their wine to be a 29 year wine…

36

Greg and Larry - Sure lots of things have changed (replanting, rootstocks, vine material, etc.), but it seems crazy to deny the paradigm shift. Just look at average alcohol levels in Napa, which have risen very significantly in the last 20 years. Most new-release cabs today don’t taste at all like they did in the 80s, when I got serious about wines.

Case in point: I was served a '78 Ridge York Creek Cab tonight. Absolutely perfect balance in its later years. 13.9%. I can’t imagine that anything being made today will be like that at 40 years.

37

My point was that VSP, rootstocks, vine material alone explain a lot of the “paradigm shift”. There are probably advances in yeasts and enzymes that I don’t know about and other stuff that happens in the cellar that also helps, but to your point, someone has to want that as an endpoint.

38

Here’s Paul Draper discussing some relevant points: IQ_2018_Lifetime_Acheivement on Vimeo

39

We had a 2007 Outpost True Vineyard Cabernet last night with a one hour decant. It is beginning to take on the tertiary flavors of age, but only a tiny bit. The oak is integrating and there the beginning of some leathery earthiness of an aged Cabernet while still showing the fruit forward presentation of a TRB Howell Mountain Cabernet. I will write a more formal note and post it when I figure out which bottle my son pulled.

40

What does Parkerized mean? If you stack ranked wine producers average rating for the last 30 years, I’ll bet Togni would land near the top of Parker’s scale.