The alternative packaging trend gets bigger and reusable: a 2009 Riesling from the Finger Lakes in 20-liter tank will soon be available in NYC.

Known as Gotham Project, the thirst-quenching Riesling is the brainchild of Charles Bieler (above, left), of Bieler Rose in Provence and one of the Three Thieves, and Bruce Schneider (right), of Schneider Vineyards on Long Island. Bars and restaurants will be able to get it from local distributor Michael Skurnik; the only open question is whether it will be available for homes, as rooftops and poolsides beckon…

UPDATE: You can’t see it clearly in the photo, but both Bieler and Schneider are wearing black t-shirts saying “Give them the Finger Lakes.” I reproduce the image here courtesy of designer Steven Solomon. Welcome to New Yawk!

Presiding over forty harvests at Monte Bello in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the winemaker and CEO at Ridge, has seen an almost unparalleled run of excellence. It is rare among the top producers of the world not to hit a rough patch, where something just stops working for a string of vintages. But after tasting several dozen wines from vintages dating back to 1968, it’s clear to me that from vines grown on the fractured limestone, Ridge Monte Bello has been able to achieve this rare feat.

The road to Monte Bello
Born in 1936, Draper’s father was hit hard by the depression and returned to a farm outside of Chicago (Barrington, IL, is now a suburb). He eventually went to Stanford where he studied philosophy; he later worked for the US government in Italy and made some wine in Chile before being hired by the four partners of Ridge—all Stanford engineers—in 1969.

The four-and-a-half mile road to Ridge starts as two lanes. The ear-popping ascent from the floor of Silicon Valley winds under moss-covered trees, eventually becoming decidedly too small for two cars to pass. That’s about when the first vines appear.

As I arrived at the upper winery one day last week, about 2,600 feet in elevation, the rain was falling. There was Paul Draper to meet me and the dozen other journalists and members of the trade attending the tasting, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ridge.* Wearing a Gore-Tex shell, and sporting his signature trim goatee with his polarized glasses, dark in the cloudy glare, Draper smiled warmly.

We went into the cool Monte Bello barrel room where we were given two unmarked glasses. Monte Bello, the estate’s top wine, is a blend of mostly Cabernet Sauvignon and some Merlot, but also, in some vintages, some petit verdot. In our two glasses of the just-blended 2009 Monte Bello, we had to discern which one had just 0.9 percent more of one element than another.

The labels that adorn bottles of Ridge wines are models of precision. Retro-chic all-caps, blare the vineyard site; smaller font highlights each grape variety’s contribution to the blend. But nothing is as small as 0.9%. It turned out that the wine that had slightly more lift included the addition of a small amount of press wine. Almost everyone in our group preferred that wine. And it was also the current blend Draper & Co. had chosen.

Fine tuning the blend
The blending process at Ridge occurs in stages. In the February after harvest, most of the wines have completed their secondary (malolactic) fermentation. A group of ten tasters from the winery sits down to blind taste about five flights of six wines, which come from the individual vineyard plots, fermented separately. Each one is given a thumbs up or a thumbs down to qualify for the final blend. (Draper and the Monte Bello winemaker, Eric Baugher, and Lytton Springs winemaker, John Olney, admitted that their votes weigh more.) Interestingly, it is a relative way since only three from each flight can pass to the final round. In this way, each vineyard or block has an equal shot to reach the final wine. In a process known as assemblage, the various samples are then blended and set aside for another few weeks, when a second and final blend occurs.

A crucial part of achieving the consistency at Ridge Monte Bello remains the blind tasting of the various parcels. Draper said that they have also added a blind tasting of previous vintages against the final wine to assure consistency in house style from year to year, something that had escaped them one year in the 1980s.

We got to play along with the assemblage, tracing the blending process in five glasses. The first glass was a big, tight, highly structured wine, St. Estephe-like in its tannins; turns out it was 76% cabernet sauvignon and 24% merlot. Glass two saw the addition of 11% something else that added floral (lavender) aromas—turns out that was 11% petit verdot. The third glass moderated the aromatics but give the wine more depth on the palate—this addition was a dollop of cabernet sauvignon from the Steep Terrace parcel, which almost always makes it in the blend. Another shot of cabernet added more acidity and a final bolt of 7% surprisingly tannic merlot made the 2009 Monte Bello tapestry complete (for now since there’s a final blend assembled in May). The resulting wine, although still tightly wound, has excellent, depth, complexity and aromatic appeal.

The wines that do not make the top wine either end up in the Santa Cruz Mountains wine. At a list price of $42 (although often available from retailers for less), these are quite serious wines for at least a third the price of Monte Bello. The 2006 red has pretty aromas and is approachable now despite a sold core of fine tannins; the 2007 was more tightly wound at this stance and a more serious wine.

Curiously, the wines age in American oak barrels, rather than the French oak that acts as a vessel for many of the world’s top cabernets for their first year or two. Draper said that the site provided a European style of fruit and that with French oak, the wines would be mere imitations of Bordeaux and that wasn’t what he was seeking to do. The team at Ridge works with French coopers to source the wood from three forests of quercus alba (white oak) across the US (he wouldn’t reveal which, citing scarcity of the wood). The staves are aged outdoors near the forest of origin for two years, which provides many cycles of wetting and drying to leech out the harshest elements of the wood. (Coopers had tried to bring the wood to California for aging but it was too dry in the summer for Draper’s taste.)

But the real magic of the winemaking is the fact that there is no magic: winemaking occurs with a non-interventionist approach. In an age when commercial yeasts fire the fermentations of a vast majority of the world’s wines, the Ridge wines all occur with only the natural yeasts. Some say that is risky, but at Ridge it is an integral a part of the program. The yeasts appear in the winery and on the skins of the grape; damaged berries get put in the crusher since they are likely to have an abundance of yeasts as they attracted insects on the vine. There’s no micro-oxygenation and no reverse osmosis. The wines resulting from this winemaking are big and flavorful but also gracefully low in alcohol, always under 14%.

In the glass
And how do they age? Gracefully. We tasted fifteen vintages of Monte Bello over the course of one day and had no clunkers. The younger vintages are all tightly wound and will reward with more than a decade of cellaring; the world’s best cabernet assumes a delicacy and refinement that make it very much worth the wait. Of the younger releases, the 2005 stood out as particularly gorgeous with fresh acidity, minerality and youthful tannin under a seductive wrap of dark fruit.

Of the mature Monte Bellos, the legendary 1970 exhibited a gorgeous nose of delicate tobacco with the wine in a lovely place, mature yet still very much alive. This was my favorite of the pre-1990 wines and my second favorite of the night. The 1988 was really sublime with aromas of alluring mint and tobacco and a pinot-like delicacy. It had extraordinary length; I would like to try against top Bordeaux of the same vintage. The 1992 was also a superlative wine showing beautifully. The 1968 was served at the end of the meal with blue cheese. It was not port-like but, then-winemaker David Bennion left it on the lees for extended periods. Rich and ripe and mature it was a rare treat still showing impressively.

But the wine of the night, in my view, was the 1991. This wine has all the pleasure of top cabernet with age from a superior vintage and producer. That evening, it showed a multilayered subtle elegance, with a beautiful blend of mature fruit. The wine’s beautiful arc lingers impressively.

* For those who enjoy the full disclosure policies of this blog, I paid for my ground transportation on both ends of my trip, as well as my flight; Ridge paid for the hotel and meals. The wines were all from their cellars.

60-year-old cabernet vines at Monte Bello Ridge

Vineyard hazards!

With Paul Draper, both live and on the tshirt from Terroir wine bar in New York City. Draper told me that he went to Terroir where the server, upon seeing him, said that he looked better than in real life than he does on his tshirt. I’m sure that happened to Che all the time too.

Coming up in a future post, answers to the question: can Zinfandel age gracefully?

Maryland is also home to 38 wineries today. Seeking to jump-start the domestic wine industry after Prohibition, the US Department of Agriculture turned to this mid-Atlantic state, opening an experimental winery in Beltsville, Maryland. Even though it was not long-lived, today’s wineries follow the early trail blazed by the Feds. The only problem: they cannot ship their wines to consumers in-state or out-of-state. In a recent survey (pdf), all but one winery respondents found this to negatively affect their business.

The keys to reforming the laws that have kept Marylanders locked out of the wine cellar for several decades may be within reach. Although the legislation has been introduced every year since 1981, Adam Borden, executive director of Marylanders for Better Beer and Wine Laws, says that this year it has majority support in both houses.

But the legislative path is not without roadblocks. Who has screwcaps big enough to stand in the path of this legislation? Senator Joan Carter Conway, chair of the Health and Education committee, threatened to stifle the bill in committee despite six of nine members being co-sponsors. But today, a committee in the House will hear testimony on the issue.

Robert Parker, Maryland’s best-known wine consumer, will not be testifying today since he is traveling, according to Borden.

Marylanders for Better Wine and Beer Laws and their page On Facebook
House Bill (80/141)
Senate Bill (26/47)

SPIT: California bargains
Mike Steinberger contemplates the puzzle of why so few “superstar” winemakers in California make wines under $20. We discussed the lack of tasty California values last year in relation to Fred Franzia, and heard from wine importer Bobby Kacher and winemaker Patrick Campbell.

SPIT: urban winemaking
Crushpad, the pioneer urban winery in San Francisco, has announced it will move its operations to Napa where its main supplier has space. Of note: two-thirds of their clients are commercial wine brands. [NYT]

SIPPED: innovation
While New York is debating selling wine in grocery stores (and foods in wine stores), Pennsylvania, where the state still owns all the wine stores, gets wine bars in supermarkets! Groc-o-pubs anyone? [Philly.com]

SIPPED: footy!
Unruly winery visitors in the Finger Lakes will get yellow and red cards. [WENY]

SPIT: truth
A shocking piece on Slate.com reveals that during Prohibition, federal officials “ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking.” But instead it accounted for 10,000 fatalities. Unmentioned in the brief story, but maybe people were on to the scheme and that helped account for the rise in home winemaking during Prohibition?

It’s hard to know from that quote if a presence on Facebook and Twitter is a part or all of Grgich’s social media strategy. But, as we’ve discussed before, social media are no panacea for wineries, especially since they are too often a regurgitation of marketing pabulum. At best, social media are a part of (Napa) wineries’ new efforts to reach out to consumers directly and bypass the distributor tier, which can lead to increased profits for the winery. The NYT story cites a “meager” 10 percent of average winery sales in Napa are direct to consumer, via tasting rooms and mailing lists.

One thing that businesses can do well via social media, particularly since the demographic skews younger, is to alert consumers to deals. Unfortunately, deals are in scarce supply from wineries directly. The story cites the 2006 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars merlot available at the tasting room for $45 when it is available at Target in the Bay Area for $31.99. Will Stag’s Leap be tweeting about this? Doubtful.

The article alludes to a “curious time warp” with winery tasting room practices and pricing. More evidence of the pricing time warp came last week when a Napa cab from Stephane Derenoncourt launched at $220. While the pricing showed a tin ear to the current economy, the press release contained something unusual that may have been a sign of the times: a plea to write about the new wine.

If Derenoncourt were releasing a $20 Napa cab, that would be worth tweeting.

“Try the Red: Napa Learns to Sell” by Katrina Heron.

But wine lovers knew this! Since at least King James and Thomas Jefferson, wine has been seen wine as a drink of moderation, lower in alcohol than spirits and consumed with food. Gladwell cites research from the 1950s that showed that first-generation Italian immigrants in New Haven, CT had very low levels of alcoholism, despite drinking some wine with lunch and dinner. Other immigrant groups and second- and third-generation Italians had different patterns of consumption (less moderation, less with food) and had higher rates of alcoholism.

This relates to our discussion last fall teaching about wine in elementary schools, in Italy and America.

It’s good to see the topic getting a broad airing–check out the story if you are snowed in somewhere (it’s not available online). Here’s a taste:

The abuse of alcohol has, historically, been thought of as a moral failing. Muslims and Mormons and many kinds of fundamentalist Christians do not drink, because they consider alcohol an invitation to sin. Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking. Policymakers, meanwhile, have become increasingly interested in using economic and legal tools to control alcohol-related behavior: that’s why the drinking age has been raised from eighteen to twenty-one, why drunk-driving laws have been toughened, and why alcohol is taxed heavily. Today, our approach to the social burden of alcohol is best described as a mixture of all three: we moralize, medicalize, and legalize.

“Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it.” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, Feb 15 & 22, 2010. pp. 70 – 76.

Thanks to shortfalls in state budgets, state authorities are increasingly looking to liberalize liquor distribution according to a piece in the WSJ yesterday. The issue is in play in at least Washington State, Virginia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Vermont.

Privatization could be a mixed bag for wine enthusiasts. Consider the story of Chicago parking meters.

In early 2009, without much debate, the city council decided to sell a 75-year lease to operate the city’s parking meters. A private group led by Morgan Stanley paid $1.2 billion (about 60 times 2008 meter revenues), a portion of which helped plug the immediate budget shortfall. The first thing the group did was raise the meter rates. Then the group raised rates again, quadrupling in some areas during year one. In the first few weeks, there were reports of vandalism of the meters, a lack of repair from the new authority, confusing new meters, a lack of response to citizens and journalists who called with questions, and a higher incidence of parking tickets (the revenue from which the private group keeps). A poll last fall found that nine out of ten Chicagoans didn’t like the deal and Mayor Daley (“mayor for life”) saw his approval rating drop below 35 percent.

This example has a couple of lessons for wine. First, privatization does not equal liberalization: slothful monopolists who raise prices and limit choices can be either public or private. So as states contemplate privatizing alcohol distribution, the key aspect is fostering competition that allows niche distributors to emerge to sell fun, small production wines from the Cote Chalonnaise, or wherever. And why not take liberalization all the way and mandate out-of-state shipping from both wineries and retailers at the same time, with a mechanism to secure tax collection? Or allow ways for innovative retailers, restaurants or wineries to handle their own sourcing or supplying of wines, free of a middle tier? Or allow multiple distributors in a state to carry the same wines?

Further, privatization can easily be botched by the short-term thinking that drives most politicians: Don’t sell a 75-year lease for something that the private firm(s) can recoup in a fraction of that time. Privatization would also create more private profits that could be cycled back into electoral campaigns for politicians, further entrenching the prevailing three-tier system. Whether or not you want to raise a glass to that may depend on where you live.

Mayacamas Vineyards is one of the greatest cabernet sauvignon producers in the history of California. While so many of its contemporaries who once shared the spotlight with Mayacamas have succumbed to the tides of fashion, Mayacamas continues to proudly maintain its heritage of producing long-lived, structured and classic mountain cabernets that seemingly offer little to a modern wine world scarred with impatience and the child-like need for immediate gratification. But for those who long for great red wines that cellar with conviction and evolve in the course of time into brilliantly complex and compelling wines, Mayacamas remains one of the brightest stars in the constellation of California wine It is arguably the last man standing from the glory days of California’s past, when pioneering spirits sowed these fields from which so many subsequent producers have reaped the bounty. The great irony is that while Mayacamas Vineyards has faithfully stayed the course first fashioned by Bob and Elinor Travers soon after their purchase of this historically important estate in 1968, the world of wine has seen its attention span lessen, and the great quality of the cabernet sauvignon at Mayacamas has gone from the center of the California wine universe to one of the best-kept and little discussed secrets buried in the mountain vineyards that tower above the Napa Valley.

Located high up on Mount Veeder, Mayacamas Vineyards has been in the hands of Bob Travers since early 1968, when he and his wife Elinor turned their backs on careers in finance in San Francisco and moved north. Since the first Travers’ era release, the 1968 cabernet sauvignon, the winery was recognized as one of the greatest cab producers in the state. When Englishman Steven Spurrier canvassed California looking for top examples from the state to include in a blind tasting of top French wines versus Californian wines for a 1976 tasting for his Parisian wine shop, the 1970 Mayacamas cabernet was the one wine that he really wanted to include in the lineup, but which had already been sold out at the winery. As Bob Travers relates of that time, “I still had a few cases of the 1970 set aside for my own cellar, and if I had known then how important the Spurrier tasting would become over time, I might have been inclined to pull a couple of bottles out of my cellar for Steven for the tasting.” But instead, three bottles of the closed and still unreleased at that time, 1971 Mayacamas cabernet went off to Paris, where the wine placed lower down in the pack, due to its very structured and reticent style at that point in its evolution. Interestingly, in remakes of the Spurrier Tasting of 1976 conducted on its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2001, the now fully-blossomed 1971 Mayacamas cabernet placed first amongst the reds from either side of the Atlantic.

Today, Mayacamas Vineyards does not possess the same high wattage name recognition of cabernet producers such as Harlan Estate, Colgin or Screaming Eagle, but to my mind it remains unequivocally California’s greatest cabernet sauvignon producer, with very little remaining competition amongst California wineries for producing long-lived, ageworthy and structured wines that evolve for many decades and improve immeasurably with extended bottle age. Simply put, Mayacamas is the only First Growth caliber cabernet still produced in California, and the only wine that one can reliably tuck away in the cellar and know that twenty or forty years down the road, the wine will have developed brilliantly. To give some idea of its longevity (and I now have tasted almost all of the top vintages of Mayacamas cabernets between the 1968 and 2003 vintages over the course of the last few years), even the inaugural vintage of 1968 continues to drink beautifully, and wines such as the 1973, 1974, 1975 and 1978 still have decades of life still ahead of them. As Bob Travers recalls, “since day one, my inspiration was the wines that I knew best from France prior to my arrival in Napa, with Bordeaux wines such as Château Latour always the wines that I sought to emulate- wines that were not made for the cellar and were not crafted to blossom over the long haul simply were not that interesting to me, and I had little desire to try to make wines in any other style than that of the wines like Latour that were always my favorites to drink.”

Tasting several vintages emphatically demonstrates the slight early herbaceousness of Mayacamas cabernets, which gives way in the fullness of time, with these early herbal tones of bell pepper and green peppercorn evolving into notes of tobacco leaf, earth and often a very distinct note of chipotle pepper that I also find in many mature vintages of La Mission Haut Brion. In fact, Mayacamas cabernet at its peak often delivers an aromatic and flavor profile that shares many elements with La Mission or other top Graves properties, coupled to a deep core of sweet black cherry fruit that could only hail from California. Needless to say, it is a rather impressive and exciting mélange of flavors and aromas.

The secret to Mayacamas’ contemporary cabernet dominance over its neighbors in California was once no secret at all, as Bob Travers continues to make wines exactly as he has done since his very first vintage, and which he recalls “was the way everyone made cabernet here in Napa when I was first starting out.” Prior to buying Mayacamas Vineyards in 1968, Bob spent the year of 1967 working alongside Joe Heitz at Heitz Cellars, and he credits Joe Heitz with much of his winemaking skills, though he is quick to point out that other seminal California winemakers at the time, including Louis Martini and André Tchelistcheff were also very free with their advice and were great influences on the Mayacamas style. The winemaking style here is quite old world in its methodology, with the yields in the vineyards kept quite low to allow the grapes to ripen without allowing the sugar levels to soar, so that Mayacamas cabernets retain some of the finest natural acidity of any red wines in California and rarely weigh in over thirteen percent natural alcohol. As Bob Travers ventures to say, “all that talk of physiological ripeness these days with cabernet is simply an excuse to try and get huge crop loads to ripen sufficiently, as cabernet is always going to taste really green at those yields unless you let the grapes hang out there until they are nearly raisins.” But if the yields are kept low, then one can get good phenolic ripeness in the grapes without having to produce a wine at ridiculously high alcohol levels of over fifteen percent.

Once the grapes arrive at the Mayacamas cellars, the goal of making a long-lived wine continues with winemaking practices that are quite different from what is routinely practiced at most other cabernet-producing wineries these days. It is not only in the realm of viticultural philosophy that Bob Travers and his beloved Mayacamas Vineyards fly in the face of today’s conventional wisdom, as his cellar techniques would be anathema to ninety-five percent (or perhaps more) of all winemakers on the gold coast these days, though ironically, they sound very much akin to what is practiced by many of Europe’s greatest red wine producers. For his cabernet sauvignon, he utilizes whole berry fermentation for the initial seven to fourteen days (depending on the quality of the stems), followed by crushing and destemming. The wine undergoes alcoholic fermentation in cement tanks, and is then aged initially in large, one thousand gallon old oak foudres for eighteen months. After this period the wine is racked into sixty gallon French oak barrels (less than twenty percent of which are new in any given vintage) for a bit more barrel aging of six to twelve months, depending on the needs of the wine. The Mayacamas cabernets are then bottled without fining, and aged an additional two years in bottle prior to release. In many regards, Mr. Travers’ vinification techniques and elevage regimen sounds much more akin to those of a great Piemonte producer such as Bruno Giacosa or Bartolo Mascarello than it does to any of the technical cellar wizardry propounded by most California winemakers today.

But it does not take a genius to decide whether or not the Mayacamas approach to cabernet is successful, as with sufficient bottle age, these magical cabernet sauvignons simply tower over most of their contemporaries. At a recent tasting of the highly-reputed 1991 California cabernets, which I will be writing about in an upcoming issue of my newsletter, the ’91 Mayacamas was the youngest of all the wines in the tasting, and was still climbing up in search of its magical apogee, while many of the other highly-touted 1991s were already getting long in the tooth and starting to show overt signs of oxidation and imminent decline. Interestingly, Mayacamas Vineyards today generally has a reputation outside of the realm of cabernet insiders of once having been great, but having lost their way after the decade of the 1970s, with conventional wisdom being that the cabernets today from Mr. Travers are not in the same league as they once were in their glory days. However, nothing could be further from the truth, as the new vintages of Mayacamas cabernet are every bit as good as their legendary wines made in the 1970s, and in reality, the newer vintages will probably prove over the fullness of time to be even a tad superior in terms of elegance and refinement than their early descendants, as they are made from more mature vineyards than was the case with the wines of the 1970s. But the key to understanding Mayacamas cabernets is to allow the wines to receive the bottle age that they both deserve and demand, as a top vintage of Mayacamas needs at least twenty years of cellaring to really begin to blossom and show of all of its magical depth and complexity. While other top cabernet producers in California, such as Ridge Monte Bello and Château Montelena also continue to make classic, age-worthy wines that evolve beautifully with long-term cellaring, it has been my experience that neither estate can quite match the depth, complexity and breed exhibited by the vast majority of vintages of Mayacamas cabernet at age twenty-five or thirty.

As Bob Travers observes, “we have always aspired to make long-lived wines, and if a wine takes fifteen or twenty years to reach its peak, then that is just fine with me,” as “I am perfectly happy to be patient as long as the wine turns out to be worth waiting for.” However, such philosophy is not shared by the vast majority of cabernet producers in California today, nor many of the influential critics who form a key constituency for most wineries in this day and age. The general trend is to make riper, more alcoholic and more simple wines that show best right at the outset, gussied up with high percentages of new oak, with the potential for graceful evolution in the bottle blithely traded for early accessibility and more obvious profiles that garner higher scores from easily impressed and really rather unsavvy critics. That this style of wine generally has a ridiculously short shelf life for cabernet sauvignon- one of the longest-lived red wine varietals- seems to be immaterial to most winery owners and cabernet advocates, who are happy to see these fat and happy cabernets rolled out a few years after the vintage and consumed while still in their simple, pumped up and boringly monolithic youths. Fortunately for those who still want cabernets that age with the grace and complexity of the wines from California’s golden age- the decade of the 1970s, where not coincidentally, the state’s reputation as a world class wine region was justifiably earned–Bob Travers and Mayacamas Vineyards remain standing on the pinnacle of Mount Veeder, overlooking a dramatically altered landscape below in Napa Valley, but still quietly acting as guardians of California’s historical legacy of great cabernet sauvignon.

2003 Mayacamas Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon (about $65; find this wine)
The soon to be released 2003 cabernet from Mayacamas shows a bit more ripeness and generosity than is customary with this great wine (weighing in at a full thirteen percent alcohol, rather than the optimal 12.5%), but also delivers all of the structural integrity that makes this California’s greatest red wine. The bouquet on the 2003 is almost exuberant today, as it offers up notes of black cherries, sweet cassis, tarry tones, tobacco leaf, a great base of stony mountain soil, lead pencil and the faintest whiff of cedar. On the palate the wine is classically deep, full-bodied and structured, with a rock solid core of sweet black fruit, bracing acidity, firm, chewy tannins and outstanding length and grip on the very, very long, primary and oh, so serious finish. Tasting this wine takes me back to the excitement I had tasting the newly released 1986 Bordeaux vintage, as this wine very much resembles structurally the very best of those wines. Simply a great wine in the making, and perhaps a Mayacamas cabernet vintage that will drink brilliantly at fifteen years of age, rather than the customary thirty. Get in line now, as this is a wine that one does not want to miss. 2015-2050. 94

1991 Mayacamas Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon
The 1991 Mayacamas cabernet is really beginning to blossom at sixteen years of age and offers up another very Graves-like personality on both the nose and palate. The bouquet is deep and lovely, as it offers up a complex mélange of tobacco leaf, black cherries, cassis, hot stones, herbs and a fine base of complex soil tones. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, firm and tangy, with a fine core of sweet fruit, great focus and balance and a very long, classy and moderately tannic finish. The 1991 is already a lovely drink with some decanting time, but given how great Mayacamas cabernets become with twenty-five odd years of bottle age, I would still be strongly inclined to hold off on drinking this fine 1991 for another eight to ten years. Not that it is a bad drink today, but there are very clearly plenty more layers of complexity, not to mention more generosity, that will emerge with further bottle age. A superb vintage for Mayacamas. 2017-2050. 93+

1985 Mayacamas Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon
I vividly remember the hype surrounding the quality of the 1985 cabernets, and I studiously tucked away a myriad of the most highly recommended examples of the vintage in my cellar when these wines were on the market. Funny how, what clearly appears to be one of the best, if not the very finest cabernet of the vintage was not on everyone’s short list of must have wines back in 1987, but Mayacamas’ star had already begun to wane amongst the fashionable cabernet cognoscenti by the late 1980s. This was clearly too bad for my own cellar, for many of the most highly acclaimed 1985 cabs have decidedly not panned out, the ’85 Mayacamas is a brilliant bottle of wine that emphatically demonstrates what all the vintage fuss was about in the first place. The nose is deep and brilliant, as it soars from the glass in a complex blaze of black cherries, cassis, road tar, tobacco, a bit of green peppercorn and a complex base of mountain soil tones. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, deep, very pure and soil-driven, with a stunning core of sweet, black fruit, laser-like focus, impeccable balance and a nearly endless, still moderately tannic finish that closes with stunning depth and grip. Again, this is eminently drinkable today, but the best is yet to come. 2020-2060. 95+

1974 Mayacamas Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon
What a run of vintages California had in the decade of the 1970s, and how fortunate we all are that Mayacamas was in the hands of Bob Travers and at the top of its game during this remarkable decade of munificence. When all is said and done, the 1974 will probably be considered the finest wine ever produced at this legendary winery, and the wine is now entering into its brilliant apogee of peak drinkability. The bouquet offers up a celestial blend of black cherries, allspice, tobacco, very complex, Graves-like soil tones, dark chocolate, smoke and a touch of roses in the upper register. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, very sweet at the bottomless core and utterly refined, with melting tannins, lovely framing acidity and great length and grip on the thundering and brilliantly complex finish. A stupendous wine with decades of magical drinking still ahead of it. 2007-2040. 98

1968 Mayacamas Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon
The 1968 Mayacamas was the first vintage ever made by the Travers family, and it is a remarkable wine by any stretch of the imagination, and is simply challenges credulity as a first effort! The beautiful, fully mature nose offers up a sweet mélange of red and black cherries, fresh nutmeg, sweet Cuban tobacco, again, Graves-like soil tones, and even a hint of brick dust in the upper register. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, plush and wide open, with lovely focus and balance, still sound acids, but little sign of remaining tannin and an almost gentle, caressing core of fruit by Mayacamas normally firm standards. The finish is very long, graceful and complex, but the wine has been fully mature for many years and is probably now nearing the end of its plateau of maturity. I would opt for drinking it over the next decade if I had any bottles in the cellar, but it would not shock me to still see this wine cruising along longer than that, as it is beautifully balanced. 2007-2017? 93

For more from John Gilman, check out his newsletter A View from the Cellar.

By Evan Dawson

Whither Napa Cabernet? The economy dealt a blow to the iconic American wine as consumers started reaching for less expensive bottles. Now, a growing number of critics and consumers, including those in California, are openly wondering if the Napa Cabernet train has come off the rails: commentator Dan Berger, for one, last week dismissed California Cabernet as “little more than a parody of itself.”

High up the side of Mount Veeder one sunny but cool, midwinter morning a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t help wondering if the way back might offer ideas for Napa’s way forward. After all, the Cabernets of the 1970s helped put Napa on the world wine map, so it seemed reasonable to wonder if in wine, as in fashion, the past could provide inspiration.

To find one answer to this question, I had ventured to the Maycamas Vineyards. Celebrated in the 1970s as a leading producer of Cabernet, I was curious if the once-hot style would seem as out of place as bell bottoms or as appealing as Mad Men. After all, not much had changed there.

Unlike most of their competitors, Mayacamas doesn’t go out of their way to attract visitors. There is no tasting room on one of Napa’s two main thoroughfares. My appointment confirmation included instructions to drive to the top of Mount Veeder, find the cluster of 13 mailboxes, and turn up the dirt road. That’s it. While Rubicon Estate rolls out a literal red carpet for visitors, Mayacamas makes it a scavenger hunt.

But Bob Travers, the 70-year old owner and winemaker, is not there simply to tell stories of Napa’s halcyon days, nor has he sought to create a numinous landmark to excite traditionalists. In fact, it appears that Travers hasn’t altered a thing since taking over the property in 1968.

“This is the most enjoyable thing I can think of doing,” he told us with a smile as he joined us in the small visitor’s building.. “Maybe Napa has changed over the years. But we have not.”

It’s an admirable sentiment in a region that has seen a flood of high-wattage consultants and high-alcohol wines. “I enjoy those big Cabernets,” Travers said, and then with a wink he added, “for a sip or two. They make me tired. I don’t find myself wanting to drink another glass. I don’t think they go well with food. And I don’t think they age very well, either.”

The Mayacamas barrel room is designed for utility, not photo shoots. While many Napa barrel rooms are temples of modern cooperage, the storage at Mayacamas seems complacently disheveled. No two barrels look alike; even the barriques are different colors. Travers proudly announced that he “uses two percent new oak each year.” An employee urged us to touch the walls, which were covered in black mold. “They’re like velvet!” she said. “Isn’t that cool?”

Given the state of the barrel room and the approach of the winemaker, some cynics might assume they’d find Brett in the wines – or, at least, those nefarious and nebulous “green flavors.” This is, after all, a mountain winery using mountain fruit. The valley floor sees hotter mesoclimates and more concentrated grapes but the mountains provide cooler weather and, if harvest dates are the same, lower sugars in the grapes. Hell, Travers even owns a snow shovel.

But the assumptions of flawed wines are wrong. Back in the tasting room, we tasted the current release (2004) and a library release (1996). The 2004 was introverted but elegant. The ‘96 was gorgeous, showing a loamy black cherry that evoked a Brunello from Biondi-Santi, as well as menthol and grilled herbs. It checked in with an anachronistic 12.5% alcohol by volume, and its lithe profile hints at a wine that might evolve impressively for years to come.

Travers always offers a library wine for visitors to taste. “We can’t just pour the current wine because no one would know what they’re getting,” he explained. Unlike other Napa producers who have had to slash prices (some from triple to double digits), Mayacamas Cabernet has seen a very gradual price increase over the years. The current release sells for $65, right in the middle of the Napa Cabernet pack but miles below the lofty prices staked on bigger, brawnier wines. On average the price for Mayacamas Cabernet rises about $1 per year, which the staff calls “comfortable.” The library release sells for about twice that price, but visitors can buy half-bottles, which have the dual benefit of keeping the cost down while providing the wine in a vessel that promotes slightly faster aging. Travers has never found an occasion to crank up the price and he clearly doubts the business practice of charging triple-digits for wines that might fall apart after only a few years. “We’ve never made wines to drink young. It’s not always the best business plan, but we make wine to reward patience. This is how it was in 1968, and this is how it ought to be today.” He heavily disputes the notion that in Napa, Cabernet can’t ripen physiologically unless it essentially withers into a raisin on the vine, one grape-growing technique that can lead to the higher-alcohol style prevalent today.

Eventually someone else will take over the winemaking at Mayacamas, and they’ll have to decide whether to increase the 4,000-case production. The staff at Mayacamas admits that during an economic downturn, smaller producers might have an edge. Mayacamas enjoys a small but devoted following, and as the trend has begun to turn away from monstrously large wines, more tourists have been seeking appointments and tours on top of Mount Veeder. (The tour and tasting are free – another throwback practice in the valley. “If you can make it up the mountain, you shouldn’t have to pay extra to walk around,” an employee explained.)

Travers only plans to keep making elegant Cabernet for the foreseeable future, but a succession plan might already be in place. Two of Travers’ sons are “highly involved” in the business, and a relative is his assistant winemaker. It’s an indication to customers that whether Travers works for another three or thirty years, the style is unlikely to change.

The critics, perhaps seduced by high-alcohol, high-octane Cabernets, don’t seem to understand Travers’ stubborn adherence to tradition. Last summer, Wine Spectator’s Jim Laube tasted a 1974 Mayacamas Cabernet and raved about its depth and balance. He awarded the wine 95 points, then wrote, “I’m not sure why Mayacamas Cabernets after 1978 never achieved the same level of quality, since they come from the same vineyard and most of the same winemaking techniques are still employed.” But since Travers says the winemaking didn’t change, then perhaps Laube’s preferences have.

That’s okay with Bob Travers, who no longer submits wines for review. The community of reviewers on CellarTracker seem to appreciate Mayacamas wines more than professionals; Mayacamas Cabernets routinely average higher than 90 points on the site.

So perhaps wines like Mayacamas Cabernet are indeed the bell bottoms of the wine world: out of style with most, longing to make a comeback. But Bob Travers would prefer to think of his wines less like the faddish bell bottoms and more like blue jeans: Consistent, not flashy, built to last. It’s the style that never fell out of fashion on top of Mount Veeder, and it might be the style that will allow more producers to bring stability back to the valley.

Photos by Evan Dawson

Sadat X, a niche hip hop artist, has taken up wine reviewing. The segments are concise and involve neither a dump bucket nor stemware. For more videos in the Sadat X oeuvre, head on over to Rockss and Fruit for a compendium.

Over on eBob, there’s a discussion of the best wines of the decade. While which wine was the best remains a matter of discussion, one trend is for certain: there was a steep escalation in prices of the top wines from around the world over the past decade.

What are some of the other trends of the past ten years? Well, the fundamental trend of the decade for us Americans is a decade of increased wine consumption. Every year from 2000 – 2008 (2009 data are not yet in but look to continue the trend), per capita wine consumption rose. Without this rising interest in wine, many of the other items might not have happened, or, at least, happened more slowly.

Another notable trend has been the rise of imported wine. In volume terms, this is largely thanks to Yellow Tail, created only in 2002 but has since quickly hopped to the biggest wine brand in the history of the world!! Indeed, Australian wine’s rise and fall of operatic proportions would make it a strong contender for the title of wine country of the decade.

More focused, smaller importers have also bringing more diverse wines from smaller producers and off-the-beaten path grapes than ever before. Without them, and the many specialty wine shops that sell their wines, this wine lover’s glass would be half empty.

Speaking of this wine lover, what was I doing ten years ago? Oh, yes, researching my Ph.D. dissertation about the political economy of the wine industry in France and the US. When I finished, some friends gave me the domain name of Dr. Vino and I joined the blogger brigade that has certainly turned into one of the decade’s most exciting trends (but I am biased!). Ten years ago, the trend among wine writers was to talk at consumers; today, as more confident and knowledgeable consumers have blogs (as do most newspapers and magazines), the discussion is much more lateral in bulletin boards and elsewhere. And to think that ten years ago there was no Cellartracker!

Domestically, the boutique wine industry got a shot in the arm from the 2005 Supreme Court decision that paved the way to opening up shipping from wineries to consumers. In some states, however, the bureaucratic requirements still stymie smaller producers. And the efforts to turn the fifty state markets to one national market for wine retailers will continue into the next decade (or two).

Stylistically, wines, particularly whites, have turned sharply from more overt oak to less (or none). And some wines are reversing course too, turning from higher alcohol to lower. The tough sledding at the end of the decade for high end wines may have made producers rethink using absurdly heavy bottles, thereby reducing their costs and carbon footprint. Fortunately, box wines have shown a few glimmers of improvement and hopefully producers and importers will continue to put better wines in this format, which is affordable and accessible.

These are just a few major trends from the Naughties in the wine world. What are some of the most important ones for you?

SPIT: binge drinking; SIPPED: wine tasting
An elite girls’ school in England has a new approach to tackling the problem of binge drinking: wine tastings. “We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking.” Revolutionary!! [The Indepdent; ht @candidwines]

SPIT: closures
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery produced a wine dubbed “encyclopedia” in a carafe-shaped bottle. The custom, oversized screwcaps leaked and ruined 55,000 cases of the wine, the winery alleges in a lawsuit filed against the screwcap’s manufacturer, Vinocor. [Bloomberg]

SPIT: pre-selling wine
Some California wineries are going all Rioja and consciously holding wines back for bottle aging–sometimes a decade or more–at the winery. [NYT]

SPIT: “me-too” wines
The New Zealand wine industry faces challenges, as bulk exports rise and prices fall. The NYT writes that the country’s vintners are “desperate to avoid the fate of neighboring Australia.”

Though marijuana is not fully legal [in Amsterdam], it can be sold and smoked in coffee shops, drawing tourists from around the world. You can walk down the street and catch the whiff of marijuana smoke coming out of bars–cafes as they’re called–and you can choose exactly what kind of experience you want. [voiceover from clerk: "More dreamy"...] You look at this scene and you marvel at it. It’s no different than people sitting around and enjoying their glass of wine or cigarettes.

Apparently American elementary schools aren’t the only ones who equate wine and pot. Yes, marijuana and wine are intoxicants. But there are big differences, even aside from one being legal and the other not (well, maybe not for long). Even though there are many varieties of marijuana and one Colorado newspaper may soon hire a marijuana critic, the different varieties all appear (as I found out from some googling, ahem) to create intoxication to a greater or lesser degree, faster or slower.

While intoxication is, of course, possible with wine, it is not always why a lot of wine enthusiasts lift a glass. Imagine a professional wine taster doing a ganbei and that taster wouldn’t make it very far in his career, let alone the day. Or a food-wine pairing that ended with slumping into one’s soup. Wine is not Everclear.

While certainly some wines have dialed up the alcohol in recent years, there has been consumer pushback recently with this style of wine and lower-alcohol wines have become more popular (Kermit Lynch, a retailer in Pollan’s own Berkeley, recently sold a mixed case of wines marketed as lower alcohol).

Pollan is, surprisingly, an unkind bud to wine. I guess he joins Adam Gopnik in the “whoda thunk?” group of food writers in their views on wine. Gopnik once wrote in The New Yorker: “Remarkably, nowhere in wine writing, including Parker’s and Echikson’s, would a Martian learn that the first reason people drink wine is to get drunk.”

Should food writers see wine as food?

SIPPED: logistics photos! Mmmm!
The Daily Mail published photos of 36 million bottles of wine in an English warehouse. Although their Christmas angle was different, they do note two interesting things: first, that Constellation self-distributes in England, unlike the US; and, second, they ship wine not glass by bottling all the wine in the UK after importing it in 25,000 liter bulk tanks.

SIPPED: ultra-premium wine
Want to upgrade from Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve wines? The Sonoma-based wine group now offers something new: customers who drop $30k get to taste and talk with the KJ head winemaker who will learn their wine preferences and produce a case of wine (12 bottles) with custom labels. Only $2,500 each! [Luxist; ht @ItalianWineGuy]

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