Building Blocks of a Cabernet Landmark

Few California winemakers can claim 25 years in one cellar. What makes Beringer Vineyards winemaster Ed Sbragia’s career even more remarkable is that it has produced a benchmark wine.

Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is among California’s viticultural treasures. Deliciously complex and compelling, it is at once a wine to drink now and to age for drinking later, when it has evolved into something familiar yet different.

This isn’t just another $100-a-bottle single-vineyard Napa Valley Cabernet or a random blend of whatever wines from Beringer’s extensive Napa Valley holdings show well in a given year. It is, in fact, several single-vineyard Napa Valley Cabernets rolled into one, a carefully crafted mosaic of statements from specific sites.

Sbragia’s winemaking style is an apotheosis of the old-time California take on fine wine: a powerful yet gracious expression of sun-drenched fruit with a savory undertone of minerally volcanic soil. The current 1996 vintage is a good example: Cabernet Sauvignon on the heroic scale, with a combination of richness and clarity that characterizes all the world’s great red wines.

That’s particularly rare in this warm climate. The first part is pretty easy. Richness is easily achieved in Napa Valley, where it takes cataclysmic weather to prevent grapes from ripening prodigiously each year.

Refinement is the real challenge. Excessive ripeness tends to defeat the clearly focused and defined impressions that distinguish superb wines from those that are simply “lip-smackin’ good.” The fine structure and cleanly etched aromas and flavors in the class of wines that includes Beringer’s Private Reserve can come only from outstanding vineyards.

In his select assembly of fine vineyards, carefully chosen and developed over a quarter-century, Sbragia has convened a choir of complementary voices that make beautiful music together. That synergy, he says, is what justifies blending the wines rather than bottling them separately.

“In any single year any one of the vineyards can have a peak and outshine the others,” says Sbragia. “But the blend is always better. I really find the synergy in the flavor--it’s richer, more complex than any one component.”

The first Private Reserve was produced in 1977 by legendary Beringer winemaker Myron Nightingale and his young protege, Sbragia. It was essentially a cellar selection of the best barrels from the Lemmon Ranch, later renamed Chabot Vineyard, which was originally planted in the late 19th century and had been in Cabernet Sauvignon for at least 30 years when Beringer acquired it.

Chabot is one of the valley’s outstanding Cabernet sites. Tucked into the lee of Glass Mountain--much of it is practically paved in obsidian, a gravel of crushed black glass--it is really a tiny valley protected from the breezes felt farther out on the valley floor. Its three different soil types and varied exposures mandate three to five separate harvests each year, yielding remarkably complex wines.

The 1977 Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was released in 1981, to good reviews, which encouraged the release of the ’78 later that year. The enthusiastic reception given both vintages made it all the more heartbreaking for Nightingale and Sbragia when a disastrous heat wave in September ’79 caused the dry-farmed vines to shut down early, before the grapes were ripe. There was no ’79 Private Reserve.

At that point it was clear that Beringer needed help in the viticulture department. It arrived in the form of vineyard manager Bob Steinhauer, who had been working with Andre Tchelistcheff at Beaulieu Vineyards since 1971.

Tchelistcheff’s influence had put Steinhauer in the vanguard of Napa Valley grape growers; he was ahead of his time in recognizing the valley’s wealth of uniquely expressive Cabernet sites.

“Andre helped me understand the fundamental relationship between soil and climate and wine quality,” says Steinhauer. “He used to tell me that there were about 300 distinct areas in the valley, but now I think that’s probably not enough.”

That was a decisive moment for Private Reserve. Steinhauer’s dedication to maximizing the character of distinctive vineyards was crucial to the wine’s emergence as a profound expression of Napa Valley terroirs.

In 1980 and ‘81, the Chabot Cabernet was blended with fruit from the State Lane Vineyard on the Silverado Trail south of Rutherford. The Beringer Home Ranch, first planted by Jacob Beringer in the 1880s on the well-drained alluvial soils around the winery in St. Helena, was added to the mix in ’82. Two years later, Sbragia became Beringer’s wine-master when Nightingale retired.

Bancroft Ranch, on Howell Mountain some 1,800 feet above the valley floor, began contributing its intensely aromatic and fine tannins to the cuvee in 1986. Bancroft’s lean volcanic soils also produce Beringer’s outstanding vineyard-designated Howell Mountain Merlot (since ‘87) and beautifully fragrant Cabernet Franc. Sbragia includes a small amount of Cabernet Franc in the Private Reserve blend, usually around 3% (the most so far was 7% in the ‘87).

In ’92 the Tre Colline vineyard, also high on Howell Mountain, began contributing its distinctive gravelly Cabernet voice to the chorus, along with a small amount of opulent Cabernet Franc. The rocky Marston Vineyard, on Spring Mountain above St. Helena, first made the Private Reserve cut in ’97.

Several other vineyards are currently in contention for private reserve status. One especially promising candidate is the Quarry Vineyard, an undulating strip of red-iron dirt and pale tufa just south of Chabot above the Silverado Trail east of St. Helena. It has only been producing grapes for a few years and has yet to acquire the depth of character required for the big time, but Steinhauer has made its inclusion in Private Reserve a personal challenge.

“I picked it as a Private Reserve site, but the ’99 wines didn’t make the reserve cut,” he says ruefully. “It’s driving me crazy. But I’m determined that as it matures, this vineyard will make reserve wine.”

Last week I sat down with Sbragia and senior winemaker Laurie Hook (who joined Beringer in 1986), to taste some representative vintages of Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignons along with their core components from the Chabot, Home Ranch, Bancroft and Tre Colline vineyards.

In the late-ripening ’91 vintage, all the vineyards showed their best qualities. The Home Ranch wine displayed succulent black fruit and earthy undertones--with a real whiff of “Rutherford dust,” despite the St. Helena location. The Chabot was leaner and more elegant, less massive on the palate but equally intense in its high-toned fruit with a characteristic minty note. The Bancroft sent up a heady perfume of dark Cabernet fruit with a hint of dried roses.

Each of those distinctive wines could be tasted within the ’91 Private Reserve, the way different sections of an orchestra can be discerned in an ensemble passage: a trill of red cherry here, an earthy tobacco bass note there, all within the flow of sumptuous Cabernet Sauvignon, with its lingering herbaceous coda.

The ’94 growing season produced another light crop of small, concentrated Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa Valley. Each of the components expressed the season differently, yet was true to its own character. The Home Ranch gave a softer wine that year than in ‘91, but the earthy black cherry fruit and chewy texture were consistent. The Chabot was a little deeper, but still had that same bright, open elegance. The Bancroft’s perfume was familiar, too, but with a new red cedar note (probably from new French oak barrels). Tre Colline contributed its typically austere tannin and stone-inflected Cabernet fruit, along with a small amount of spicy Cabernet Franc. All of those inherent consistencies and vintage variations were reflected in the powerful yet finely drawn ’94 Private Reserve.

So, too, are the unique tones of the 1996 growing season heard in the marvelous polyphony of the ’96 Private Reserve. A warm autumn developed opulent black cherry and chocolate flavors in the Home Ranch Cabernet. Chabot showed a remarkably brilliant intensity of flavor with typical herbaceous mint overtones. Tre Colline contributed its unique sensation of fruit-flavored gravel, and Bancroft its fine-grained tannin and extraordinary perfume, this year with notes of blueberries and incense.

In ‘94, Sbragia began bottling 200 cases of wine from each Private Reserve vineyard in every vintage. The component bottlings are only available at the winery, and they’re snapped up quickly by wine fans eager to taste the building blocks of a great California wine.

“It’s a way to look inside the winemaker’s head,” says Sbragia. “The interesting thing about the single-vineyard wines is in how they change from vintage to vintage, showing how we adapt to each vineyard.”