Building a Cab

If you can’t handle raw, tannic red wine, stop reading right now. We’re about to sit in on a blending session with master winemaker Bernard Portet, the founder and president of Clos du Val Winery in Napa Valley. Our mission is to put together the winery’s 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, assembling each blend from an array of separate vineyard lots. The finished wines will be released in 2002, or thereabouts; between now and then they will age quietly in French oak barrels in the winery’s air-conditioned cellar just north of Napa, in the valley’s Stags Leap District.

Portet and his associate winemakers, Kian Tavakoli and John Clews, are seated at a long table in Tavakoli’s office off the laboratory. There are only four glasses in front of each taster, but nobody has any illusions that this will be easy. Nearby are dozens of empty glasses and a graduated cylinder for precise measurement of liquid, and a few steps away is a vast cellar filled with wine. The possibilities are virtually unlimited.

We know what we have to do, and it won’t be pretty. Young red wines are like caged beasts--wily, aggressive, unpredictable. We will all have purple teeth before this is over.

As we begin to taste, Portet reviews the “Clos du Val mouthfeel philosophy,” mouthfeel being one of those high-concept terms winemakers use to indicate qualities such as, in this case, how the wine feels in the mouth. The other parameters are balance, elegance, complexity, a long finish. Finesse is also to be desired, says Portet, though not necessarily to be looked for in wines just out of the chute.

“Balance and long finish are the keys,” he says. “Most of the time when people say a wine has a long finish, they just mean persistence, a lasting flavor, but the wine is still anchored at the front of the palate, with no transfer of weight. For me, persistence is not enough. I want the weight of the wine to transfer from the front of the palate to the back.”

A pretty thought, but we’re discovering that a long finish is hard to find here. These reds are challenging. The ’98 growing season was a classic El Nino near-disaster, cold and overlong, and few vineyards yielded the ripe, rich, powerful wines that have made the Napa Valley famous. There is, however, plenty to work with in the balance and complexity departments. A little spiciness here, a little interplay of red-fruit flavors there, and before you know it you have something that goes with steak.

As we sniff each wine, swirl it around in our mouths and spit it out, Portet puts ’98 into perspective, vintage-wise. “It has the same fresh acidity of ‘88, which was vastly underrated,” he says. “It also has some of the suppleness of ’91. But at this point, it’s evolving like ‘92--gentle, elegant, and well-balanced.” We make notes. We exchange telling and insightful remarks. We go on to the next wine. The ordeal has just begun.

Portet is one of the pillars of the modern California wine industry. He founded Clos du Val in 1972, when there was only a handful of quality-oriented producers in the Napa Valley. However, being French by birth and inclination (his father made wine in Bordeaux at Cha^teau Lafite-Rothschild for many years), Portet has always done things a little differently than most California winemakers.

The usual practice in California is to keep all the lots of wine from a single vintage separate in the cellar for a year or so, until just before bottling. It’s a policy of calculated procrastination. The winemaker tastes through the barrels regularly to see how things are coming along, and even makes trial blends, but final commitment only comes under pressure from time and the winery’s financial backers.

The French practice is to decide on a blend as early as possible so that the components can unite and coalesce in the barrel. “Wood locks the wine into place,” he says. “The earlier you can assemble the wine, the longer it can age as a whole wine, and the more stable the taste is at bottling.

“All the parts have learned to live together in the same barrel. They’ve fought it out. If they’re blended just before the wine is released, it’s like a cartoon fight, with all the arms and legs and ears sticking out.”

As in all other important aspects of winemaking, the French have a specific term for this practice: “elevage,” the “raising” of the wine.

Now there are a dozen glasses in front of each taster. Tavakoli keeps leaping up to measure and mix new blends of Cabernet, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

Two working blends develop, a Cabernet with some Merlot and a Merlot with some Cabernet. Each is made up of subordinate blends that are, in turn, composed of even more basic blends. There’s a lot to be desired in the basic Merlot, so we make a new Cabernet blend to improve it. Then we can use the improved Merlot blend to make a better Cabernet.

At each step the wines are deconstructed and rebuilt--one step down and two up. Nothing can change the essential vintage-derived character of the wines, but a great deal depends on how they’re combined.

“I’m a little like a horse-cart driver,” muses Portet at one point. “The horse is the wine, and that’s what pulls everything along. But I decide where it will go.”

We press on, our teeth and palates throbbing under the double assault of tannin and acidity. Now we’re shaping the blends--filling in the mid-palate here, toning down the herbaceousness there, finding a point of balance on which the weight of the wine can shift from the front of the mouth to the back.

At one point our attention focuses on a particular blend of Merlot and Cabernet. It has something nasty about it, and I don’t mean nasty ha-ha. There’s a certain redolence that suggests, “Well, I guess we don’t have to worry about those mice in the room addition anymore.”

I can’t bring myself to taste it. Portet knows better. “It’s just a phase the wine is going through,” he says. “It will disappear. In fact, there’s real complexity here.”

Oddly, a little bit of that stuff helps the blend. It sort of enhances all the good sensations and lets the palate-noise drop, like flicking the low-range booster switch on a stereo. No more dead mice, in other words. Instead, heightened aromatics and a well-defined yumminess.

One by one we perfect--or, at least, improve--the other components. We see purple light at the end of the tunnel, and finally there are viable candidates for the kind of focused, elegant wines for which Clos du Val is known.

On our way out of the winery, we buy bottles of ’90 and ’94 Clos du Val Cabernet Sauvignon. Enjoying them with dinner over several subsequent evenings, we reflect on their superb balance and structure, their apparently seamless flow of aromas and flavors.

They are different, of course, the ’90 bright and sleek and the ’94 deep and powerful, yet behind the vintage characteristics they are quite similar in their elegance and length on the palate.

Like all 27 vintages produced by Clos du Val to date, they are expressions of the Napa Valley in a particular year as interpreted by gifted and uncompromising sensibilities.

If they’re not, of course, it’s not our fault.