Cult Cabs

You folks living in the paradise that is California are probably blissfully unaware of how the rest of the world sees you: We’re insanely jealous. You live off the fat of a beautiful land in a great climate while bouncing gently from one economic boom to another.

Until recently, there was one thing we Europeans thought we had over you: what we ate and drank. But California earned its place in the world of cuisine some years ago--and now it would seem, on the basis of a recent tasting, that the best California wines really can stand up to comparison with France’s finest with ease.

This was demonstrated at a recent tasting in Northern California, where some of North America’s best bottles were tasted against the likes of first-growth Bordeaux and Grand Cru Burgundies.

The most striking of our series of 18 flights, encompassing 165 different wines, was the tasting devoted to the so-called cult Cabernets, those wines made by the teaspoonful and available only to those who have made money by the tankerful.

Our starry line-up included the 1994 Cabernet from L.A.’s very own cult winery, Moraga of Bel-Air ($125), together with 1995 Cabernets from the hottest properties in the Napa Valley today: Screaming Eagle ($125), Grace Family Vineyard ($200), Araujo Estate “Eisele Vineyard” ($135), Bryant Family Vineyard ($150) and Harlan Estate ($175). Also served unidentified were 1995s from Leonetti Cellars ($60), one of Washington state’s most admired Cabernet producers, and a 1995 Bordeaux first growth--Chateau Mouton-Rothschild ($300), no less--together with a rogue Australian Cabernet, celebrated viticulturist Geoff Hardy’s 1996 from Kuitpo ($90) in the fashionable Adelaide Hills.

The first thing to be said is that the Bordeaux, served sixth out of the 10, stood out immediately. The Mouton was one of the deepest-colored wines and was much, much drier and tougher than the New World wines. This was clearly an extremely sophisticated wine, with Mouton’s highly distinctive perfume, somehow suggestive of an Oriental bazaar, but it was strongly signaling that it would be much obliged if we would go away and leave it alone for a decade or two.

This was the major difference between the American wines and the rest. You Americans are just so damned precocious, open, welcoming and uninhibited. “Come on in! Take a gulp and enjoy me in all my glory” was the general message I was getting.

They were sumptuous, in the quite literal sense of the word: rich, lavish and costly. So easy to enjoy even now, yet in most cases with a respectable charge of tannin boding well for the future, even if it was much less obvious than in the Bordeaux first growth.

But there is such a thing as too much charm. Two of the wines seemed to me to take this ripeness thing a bit too far. The 1995 Bryant Family was noticeably sweeter, more baked, even slightly jammy, compared to the best of the rest. The 1995 Grace Family also tasted slightly overripe and unappetizing. The fruit had obviously been handled with extreme tenderness, but my stubborn Old World palate found it hard to imagine itself desperate for a second glass.

My three favorite wines were 1995 Cabernets from two of the Napa Valley’s new aristocrats, Harlan Estate and Araujo’s Eisele Vineyard, and the interloper from the hills of Bel-Air, the 1994 Moraga.

I’d never tasted Moraga before--just read about the audacity of Tom Jones, ex-chairman of Northrop, creating a vineyard on land that would be worth tens of millions of dollars to developers. But I was impressed by the wine. What I liked about it was that it was emphatically not a blockbuster; it was one of those wines you enjoy, rather than admire. It was clearly a little more evolved than the others, as one would expect because of its extra year in bottle, and it had a lovely, caressing sort of effect on the palate. It was a neat, beautifully balanced, elegant sort of a wine whose flavor went on and on. Most impressive.

I saw the 1993 vintage of Moraga on the much-vaunted 1,300-strong wine list at the new Veritas restaurant in New York for just $95 last week. Unfortunately I was with a Francophile wine expert who had never heard of it, but I cursed myself afterward, especially when suffering the aftereffects of an Henri Bonneau Cha^teauneuf-du-Pape (14 1/2% alcohol), for not having insisted on ordering Los Angeles’ most famous wine instead.

I had been lucky enough to taste the Harlan and Araujo before, and this tasting merely confirmed my early impressions that these are great, great wines.

I visited Bart and Daphne Araujo last year at their new winery burrowed into the hillside next to the famous old Eisele vineyard, expecting to find that they were simply one more couple using a fortune made elsewhere to play at being wine producers and found my preconceptions confounded. These people are serious about quality, and the wine tastes like it. My tasting notes include terms like “fireworks, savory, tannins well hidden” and “glamorous cocktail.”

About the Harlan “proprietary red wine” (a mix of Merlot and Cabernet), I had written impetuously, “Why doesn’t all wine taste like this?” It’s just so suave and dense, again obviously the product of a place as well as some fancy winemaking. I used the word “glamorous” for this wine too, and I wonder whether that is not the hallmark of California’s best wines.

Certainly the Screaming Eagle, the 1995 Seavey Cabernet ($60, not quite--yet?--a cult Napa Valley Cabernet), the Leonetti and the Australian wine were all very ambitious and competently made, and were quite approachable already, but they didn’t have the intense core of my favorite three.

Does it matter that these wines are so easy to drink young? The market certainly doesn’t seem to think so--in fact, fashionable young wines can easily cost more than their more venerable counterparts nowadays. Should one deduct points for the fact that these wines, unlike a Bordeaux first growth, are perfectly capable of giving pleasure at just four years of age? Emphatically no, I would say.

For better or worse, life is in fast- forward mode, and it makes sense to have wines that suit that slightly disturbing fact. I suspect they will have nothing like the longevity of the Mouton, and that if I’m still around in 2020, I’d much rather drink the Bordeaux. But in the meantime, God bless America.

Robinson lives in London. The paperback edition of her autobiographical “Tasting Pleasure--Confessions of a Wine Lover” (Penguin, $15.95) has just been published.