Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Deserves Toast for Magical Taste

The scene two weeks ago Saturday was curious: people lined up to buy wine at the tiny Heitz Wine Cellars tasting room in the heart of the Napa Valley.

The wine they wanted cost $50 a bottle.

Meanwhile, across Highway 29, another group of people was meandering into the tasting room at Sutter Home Winery. The wine they sought sells for $5 a bottle. Both groups appeared equally happy at the prospect.

The juxtaposition of the two incidents, within a few hundred yards of one another on the same day, struck me as almost surreal--a contrast in what the Napa Valley means to two very different types of people. And it indicates that merely having a winery in the Napa Valley conveys a magic message.

A week earlier, Napa County supervisors had adopted a regulation that would permit existing wineries to continue certain non-wine practices such as concerts and the sale of label-adorned aprons and prohibit the same activities for new wineries. The idea is to limit growth and encourage the continued use of the land for agriculture.

This came about because more than two million visitors gravitate here each year, a figure that is growing.

Yet despite the fact that the Heitz and Sutter Home visitors are quite different, no one would argue that either type of visitor is unwanted. Tourists build business, and that business is, after all, agriculture-based. And the better business is, the less likely that homes will replace vines.

The Heitz wine that the intelligentsia were there to adopt was the 1985 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, arguably the most famous red wine in the valley--and from a vintage heralded as one of the state’s best. It was released Feb. 1 but sold during a pre-release offering at the winery. Briefly.

Joe Heitz thought the wine so good he not only raised the price a full $20 a bottle from the prior vintage, but he put on its face a commemorative label featuring the work of artist Richard Danskin, the same artist whose painting was on the 1974 Martha’s Vineyard wine.

The 1974 wine was a 10th anniversary wine, and Heitz thought long about putting the commemorative label on the 1984 wine for the 20th, but at long last, “I figured the ’85 was a better wine, so that’s where the label went.”

The decision on what Heitz would ask for this wine was one I could only term agonizing. I attended a blind tasting of Martha’s Vineyard and 10 other wines at the Heitz winery in December, as Heitz was deciding how to price it. Included in the tasting were wines from around the world, including 1985 Chateau Petrus (about $300 a bottle) and 1986 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild ($100).

A dozen tasters sampled in silence for more than an hour and scored the wines. The scores then were tallied. The group ranked the ’85 Martha’s Vineyard No. 1; Petrus finished ninth, and Mouton 11th.

The showing of the French wines didn’t bother Heitz as much as the showing of the 10th place wine, which all tasters agreed was not particularly exciting. It was the 1985 Stag’s Leap Cask 23, which just a few weeks earlier had been priced at $75 a bottle and which sold out despite the price.

Heitz was bothered by the $75 price tag, feeling it set a precedent and was not a “real world” price but somewhat artificial based on the fact that the wine had sold for such a high price at auction last summer.

The fact is, said Heitz in polite and delicate terms, the ’85 Martha’s Vineyard was a better wine, and yet he couldn’t imagine charging $75 for it, even though it would sell out at that price. Yet to charge only $40, as past Martha’s Vineyard wines had been, would indicate he didn’t think the wine was as good as the Stag’s Leap.

So the decision was made: the wine would be $50 a bottle until March 1--or until the first allotment sold out--and then it would go up to $60 a bottle. Those waiting in line were there to save $10 a bottle.

The allotment ran out before all waiting in line were served. As a reference point, Martha’s Vineyard is, according to one wine-price expert, the best wine investment. Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton University professor and publisher of Liquid Assets, a wine-price newsletter, says older vintages of Martha’s Vineyard wines bring more at auction than any other American wine.

How is the 1984 version? you may ask. I ranked it No. 2 in the group to the 1985 Mondavi Reserve ($43). I found the Martha’s Vineyard wine to be spectacular, with a rich chocolate and burnt toast kind of overlay to fruit that is deep like currants, delicately spicy, and very flavorful in mid-palate and finish.

The Mondavi has a more high-tone violet floral lilt of fruit to it and wasn’t as dark and concentrated, but finished with a classic currant aftertaste. Some tasters marked it down for what they said was a bit too much new French oak. The wine finished fourth in the group.

For the record, the group liked the 1984 Martha’s Vineyard ($40) second best (my fourth-place wine), and the 1981 Martha’s Vineyard third best. All bottles were opened by one taster and the corks discarded. The bottles were placed into paper bags by another person, and the bags numbered and coded by a third person.

Across the road from the Heitz tasting room, business as usual prevailed at Sutter Home, the largest winery in the Napa Valley and the winery that helped change the face of the valley with its $5 wonder, White Zinfandel.

In 1980, after making a dry-styled white wine from the red Zinfandel grape for many years, Sutter Home’s White Zinfandel, made since the early 1970s, was up to 66,000 cases, which then was considered a massive amount of a cork-finished wine that had a minimum of processing and a minimum of cost.

As the wine got a tad sweeter, and as Americans got fed up with things like Lambrusco and other pop (sweeter) wines, Sutter Home’s little gem caught on. Within two years, the winery was pressed to make enough of it and demand soon outstripped the capacity of the smallish winery.

Bob Trinchero, president of Sutter Home, had been in the wine business all his life and, with his contacts in Amador County, he was able to secure enough grapes to continue making more and more White Zinfandel. To accommodate the larger loads of grapes, the family acquired a large parcel of land on Zinfandel Lane, south of the winery, and opened up a huge plant to make wine.

By 1986, as White Zinfandel sales rocketed ahead, Sutter Home was the national leader with 1.4 million cases. In 1987, production leaped to 2.3 million cases and today, Sutter Home makes some 3.4 million cases of White Zinfandel, representing more than a third of the market.

Some people think that’s all Sutter Home makes. But included in this amazing success story is 275,000 cases of Cabernet Sauvignon and 125,000 cases of Sauvignon Blanc, not to mention smaller quantities of exceptional Reserve Zinfandel (red wine) from Amador County grapes.

All this is done without the winery resorting to 1.5-liter bottles; everything is sold in 750-milliliter bottles or smaller.

In fact, the “smaller” part of the business is one of the untold stories. In the last year, Sutter Home sold the equivalent of 125,000 cases of wine in 187-milliliter bottles, a startling figure since the little 6.3-ounce bottle with a screw cap is aimed more at picnics and airline sales than at traditional outlets.

Most of Sutter Home’s 4 million cases of wine sell in the $5 to $6 per bottle range and are usually seen discounted at $3.99 or less--the so-called pop-premium category.

Now Sutter Home is preparing to roll out a new wine, a 1989 Chardonnay, with a suggested retail price of $6.

“It was silly not to have a Chardonnay,” said Trinchero. Some 300,000 cases were produced.

I asked him if he would have a hard time selling a Chardonnay, what with all the competition at $6 and the market already crowded with major and sophisticated players such as Glen Ellen, Beringer (with its Napa Ridge brand), Domaine St. George, Sebastiani, and a half dozen others.

“It’s all pre-sold,” said Trinchero. “All our wholesalers in 12 major markets are committed. The only thing we don’t know is: how will it affect our Sauvignon Blanc sales?”

Over the past three years, Sutter Home has insured itself against a shortage of grapes by planting its own vineyards in regions east of the Napa Valley, where the land is cheaper than the $40,000 an acre some are asking for bare land in the Napa Valley. By planting in Glenn and Colusa counties, Sutter Home is assured of a supply of the grapes it needs to continue as the nation’s leader for years to come.

With White Zinfandel acting as the introductory wine for novices and Martha’s Vineyard representing the pinnacle achievement in California Cabernet, the Napa Valley will only grow as a tourist attraction.

Wine of the Week: 1980 Parducci Petite Sirah “Cellarmaster’s Selection” ($12)--Wines with nine years of aging don’t come along often, and this one is a gem. Parducci’s Petite Sirahs are excellent wines and the “reserve” bottlings even better; this one is gorgeous with peppery-berryish fruit and a depth that will match with pasta dishes. I suspect it’ll age for a few more years too.