Cabernet Heaven

Wines from Napa Valley’s Stags Leap District always remind me of people from Brooklyn. (Being a New Yorker, I say this affectionately.) Brooklynites don’t go through the world unnoticed. And though it seems prosaic to say so, Brooklynites could be from only one place on the planet--Brooklyn.

And so it is with the wines of the Stags Leap District. It’s not that the wines have the personality of a Brooklynite. These are wines with the irresistible softness of flannel pajamas, wines that, like great chocolate (which they also taste like), can hold you in their power quietly. It’s that Stags Leap wines could not be from just anywhere. They are California’s epitome of wines of a place.

Wait a minute, you might be saying. Aren’t all wines from a place?

Physically, yes; spiritually, no. Most of the world’s wines are no more reflective of or connected to a place than a Hyatt in Madrid. One of the things that makes a great wine great is that it tells the story of a specific place.

There’s something else to consider too: At least as far as wine is concerned, not all places are created equal. The Earth has its own erogenous zones, pockets of land that year in and year out (sometimes over centuries) have proved themselves especially capable of producing sensational wine. In these spots, wine can become, like a painting or a song, a moving expression of the intangible.

Says Jack Stuart, winemaker and general manager of Silverado Vineyards, “Stags Leap is one of the few appellations where there really was a ‘there there’ even before a single winery was built.”

So what is it about the Stags Leap District?

Driving north through the Napa Valley along the Silverado Trail, you could easily whiz by the district, for Stags Leap, tucked quietly into the rocky southeastern corner of the Napa Valley, is fairly small. It’s just a mile wide and three miles long.

Two things, though, will tip you off that you’ve arrived. First, you’ll see signposts for Shafer, Stags’ Leap Winery, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (two different wineries), Silverado, Pine Ridge, Steltzner, Robert Sinskey, Chimney Rock, Hartwell and others. These are names that could make any California wine lover weak in the knees.

Second, you’ll find looming above you the rugged, rattlesnake-infested outcroppings that give the Stags Leap District its name. Legend has it that a mighty stag once roamed these ancient volcanic palisades, eluding hunters for years. Finally, the hunters cornered him--or thought they had--because the powerful stag leaped to safety. (Shouldn’t all great wines come with happy endings?)

If the land itself looks callous and unforgiving, the wines are the exact opposite: lush, opulent and cashmere-soft. All wines, of course, have some sort of texture, but texture like this can be startling. And it isn’t just happenstance. For great wines, especially those made without a lot of post-harvest manipulation, texture is as much a result of terroir as of flavor. In other words, wines not only can “taste of a place,” they can also “feel of a place.”

Warren Winiarski, the proprietor of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, was one of the first to put his finger on the sheer physicality of Stags Leap wines when he described them as “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

Winiarski was talking about Cabernet Sauvignon, the leading grape of the Stags Leap District, and the grape that, more than any other, possesses the seemingly contradictory ability to be both powerful and tender at the same time.

It’s worth remembering too that it was a Cabernet from the Stags Leap District--the 1974 Cab from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars--that brought world attention to California by besting the top growths of Bordeaux in the now famous Paris Tasting of 1976.

But the wine history of Stags Leap goes back much further. The first winery to use the name Stags Leap was founded in 1890 by a San Francisco entrepreneur named Horace Chase, who built a stately stone manor so that guests visiting the winery from San Francisco would have a place to dine and sleep after their long trip via ferry and stagecoach.

In the wake of Chase’s success with Stags Leap Winery, other small wineries sprang up. But within a decade, the deadly vine louse phylloxera decimated the vines. During Prohibition, the vineyards were turned to orchards, and the Stags Leap area grew famous for prunes. Chase’s property went into decline and was abandoned in the ‘50s.

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Then in 1961 a quiet renaissance began. A would-be grape grower and home winemaker named Nathan Fry planted the region’s first Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. Fay, now 84, recalls, “At that time there were only 800 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon in the whole country. I figured demand for Cabernet could only go up.”

Warren Winiarski tasted Fay’s homemade wine and was inspired to establish a winery, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, in 1972. Around the same time, other wineries were founded in the area, including Clos du Val, Shafer and Pine Ridge. Most of them specialized in what had become the region’s magical grape: Cabernet Sauvignon.

Cab still leads the pack, even though other varietals are made in the district, including a number of good Merlots and what many consider California’s best Petite Syrah, the one made by Stags’ Leap Winery. That winery, on Horace Chase’s 1890 property, was restored by Carl Doumani in 1972.

As you’ve surely noticed, there are two wineries with the name Stags Leap. After fighting each other in court for most of the ‘70s, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and Stags’ Leap Winery both won the right to use the name, albeit with the apostrophe in different places. To commemorate the end of what came to be known as the Great Apostrophe War, the two wineries made a Cabernet together in 1985. They called it Accord. (Last year, Doumani sold Stags’ Leap Winery to the conglomerate Wine World, which owns several other historic wine properties, including Beringer.)

Of course, the Winiarski-Doumani disagreement wasn’t the only conflict over the Stags Leap name. By the mid 1980s, wines coming out of the Stags Leap area had gained stellar reputations, and John Shafer, proprietor of Shafer Vineyards, plus a group of other Stags Leap area vintners and growers applied to the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms to have Stags Leap named an official sub-appellation of the Napa Valley. Rivals Winiarski and Doumani joined together to fight the designation, which they felt would dilute the value of their hard-won winery names; meanwhile other wineries fought the proposed boundaries.

“Any time you draw boundaries,” says Nancy Andrus, past president of the Stags Leap District and marketing director of Pine Ridge, “there are wineries that want to be included, especially if they can get more money for their grapes.”

Finally, in 1989, the Stags Leap District, an official sub-appellation of the Napa Valley, was created (spelled with no apostrophe, as Horace Chase originally spelled it). Today the district encompasses 11 wineries plus vineyard holdings of other prominent wineries, including Robert Mondavi and Joseph Phelps. (About a quarter of the grapes in Phelps’ famous “Insignia” Cabernet blend come from here.)

When you taste a typical Stags Leap District wine, you understand what all the fuss is about. What’s harder to explain is precisely what it is about the soils and climate of Stags Leap that gives its Cabernets such characteristic softness and intensity. Yes, the coarse, eroded soils are, according to reports from UC Davis, unique. Yes, the bare rocks heat up the district quickly during the day. And yes, the heat drops off at night just as rapidly, as cool breezes are sucked in off the Pacific.

But why this translates to textural hedonism remains a mystery. When asked this question, Doug Shafer, president of Shafer Vineyards, responds pretty much as every other Stags Leap vintner does: with a shrug and a (gleeful) smile.

Drinking a Stags Leap wine is a bit like falling into a pot of blackberry jam (definitely not jelly). Around this core of dense fruit circle a host of other flavors: chocolate fudge, espresso, cassis, licorice, mint. . . .

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What’s missing in this flavor line-up is meaningful: green beans. A green-plant flavor, alas, is the dark side of Cabernet’s personality. When a Cabernet isn’t very good, it can descend into an aromatic nether world of asparagus, green peppers, green beans, green tea and the like.

Stags Leap Cabernets seem to sidestep this fact. And the key appears to be ripeness--complete ripeness, or what winemakers call “physiological maturity.” Paradoxically, grapes can seem ripe (that is, their sugar content can measure up perfectly) even when their other components, such as tannins, remain slightly immature.

How does a wine maker know whether a grape is really and truly ripe? He abandons his state-of-the-art equipment and uses the oldest instrument known in flavor analysis: the palate. In fact, it’s by walking through the vineyards and tasting hundreds of individual grapes a day that a winemaker gets an intuitive sense of when the grapes are ready. If they aren’t, a smart winemaker lets them hang.

“Hang time,” alas, is beset with its own problems. You can’t let the grapes hang if they’re going to fry in 100-degree heat. You can’t let them hang if they’re going to get rained on or slashed by an early fall storm.

As fate would have it, neither excessive heat nor pelting rain are threats in the Stags Leap District, and so the ability to let Stags Leap grapes hang for a long time has become the district’s secret weapon.

“Bite into an unripe peach,” advises Doug Shafer. “It may taste OK, but in the back of your mind you know it could have been great. It could have had oozing ripeness. That’s what Stags Leap Cabernets are all about--the ooze factor.”

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Experiencing Stags Leap

This September, the Stags Leap District Winegrowers Assn. will offer a case containing one bottle of each Stags Leap District Cabernet, most of them from the 1995 vintage. The “Appellation Collection” costs $395 and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. No other California wine district puts together such a comprehensive, fascinating group of wines. (Note: One prominent winery in the Stags Leap District--Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars--has chosen not to be part of the association; thus its wine is not included in the case.) For more information, call (707) 255-1720.