The Summer of ’98 Lives in Its Napa Cabernets

In vintage-dated wines, we can look back to life as it was, perhaps in a better time. A fine vintage-dated wine is a window on the past, the bottled essence of a particular summer in a certain place, when we were all a little younger and maybe a lot more innocent.

The summer of 1998, for example. That was a supremely energized and optimistic time. The global economy was revving up, and the possibility of a golden age seemed real. At this time three years ago in the Napa Valley, excitement ran high as picking crews entered the vineyards in earnest, while winemakers prepared their tanks and barrels for a new vintage of Cabernet Sauvignon.

In Rutherford, at the heart of the valley, the growing season went something like this: The winter of 1997-98 was colder than usual, with more than twice the normal rainfall. Spring was cool, too, and the vines--possibly exhausted from producing one of the biggest crops on record in ‘97--were slow to wake up. Bud break was late and further hampered by the wet weather.

The cool trend continued through the summer, and there were fears that the grapes might not ripen. Though the crop was light in the first place, crop-thinning (the “green harvest,” when a portion of the grapes are cut off the vines to give remaining bunches a better shot at maturity) became a local religion.

Not until late August did the real heat return to the valley. But after that, there was fine, warm weather through September and October. Many Napa Valley Cabernet vineyards weren’t harvested until early November.

In much of California this vintage yielded lean, green Cabernets. Not here. The results of that long, cool season in Napa Valley are luscious, intense, well-defined wines that express the terroir of individual sites more clearly than riper wines from warmer years. Excessive ripeness obscures a wine’s musculature, like body fat on an athlete. These Rutherford Cabernets are buffed and cut.

Of course, this is the kind of rather academic distinction that is made by close observers of wine. The vast majority of consumers won’t see much, if any difference between these lovely wines and the delicious ‘97s or the powerful ‘99s. Yet there is a vintage stamp, and it will become more apparent as the wines age.

These ‘98s may well age better than their top-heavy counterparts from hotter, dryer seasons. I’ve always been a fan of cool Cabernet vintages, especially in Napa Valley. I continue to like many wines from the cool ’77 growing season better than those from much hotter ’76 and ’78. The elegance of the best ‘86s vis-a-vis the more massive, awkward ‘85s is another case in point.

Like the ‘98s from the Stags Leap district I wrote about earlier this year, these Rutherford ‘98s are unusually high-toned wines. They lack nothing of the weight and structure typical of Rutherford Cabernets in general, but they’re bright and clearly defined, supple without being chewy, concentrated but not syrupy.

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At a recent tasting of ’98 Rutherford Cabernets, Beaulieu Vineyard wine master Joel Aiken pointed out, “In a cooler year like this you see more distinction from wine to wine.” In other words, there’s slightly less density to mask the individual voices.

At the same time, the commonality also shines through. The wines display the unique Rutherford character. Most of them have a clear note of what Andre Tchelistcheff called “Rutherford dust,” an unusually prominent expression of terroir. It’s unmistakable, although descriptions of it vary widely. It’s often likened to the scent of pencil shavings; to me, it’s simply the clean, earthy fragrance of a handful of dry loam scooped up from the ground on a warm afternoon, laced with a charry whiff of something like coal dust.

It is there in the Freemark Abbey “Bosche,” along with the earthy, tobacco-like flavors typical of the vineyard. It is at the heart of the powerful, sleek Staglin Family Vineyard. And it practically resounds in the radiant black-fruit finish of the brooding Niebaum-Coppola “Cask.”

The Frog’s Leap and Livingston Moffett Winery Cabs both proclaim their Rutherford-ness in an underlying savor of the soil. The Frog’s Leap is a lip-smacking wine with deep flavor and a wonderful mouth-feel of simultaneous weight and agility, all floppy and muscular like a big dog romping on the palate. Livingston Moffett is consistently one of my favorite Napa Valley Cabs, and this one is a beautiful example of winemaker John Kongsgaard’s signature style--a big, firm, majestically ripe wine with layers of flavor and texture, like fruit and minerals.

I do not find Rutherford dust in the Quintessa, from the east side of the appellation--but I love that beautifully high-toned and silky wine, unusually elegant for a Napa Valley Cabernet despite its considerable power.

The Beaulieu Vineyard “Signet Collection Clone 4” is also outstanding. Its concentrated depths yields black-fruit inflections of clear Cabernet Sauvignon character with a clear whiff of Rutherford dust. I find a similar earthy smack in the cherry-like fruit of the Bell Wine Cellars “Jackson Clone.”

Both of those single-clone bottlings are emblematic of a significant development in California viticulture, and Napa Valley Cabernet, in particular. In the last decade or so, California’s top vineyards have been fine-tuned with carefully selected plant material. The process was accelerated by widespread replanting due to phylloxera, which coincided with the availability of new clones and selections of Cabernet.

They all originated in Bordeaux, of course, but have taken different routes to Napa Valley through UC Davis. Clone 4, also called the Mendoza clone, was imported from Argentina. The Jackson clone, or Clone 6, was planted in the 1880s at a UC Davis field station in the Sierra foothills. That vineyard was then abandoned until Austin Goheen rediscovered it in 1963, when he took cuttings for propagation. Both clones emerged from Beaulieu Vineyard clonal trials in the late 1980s and are rapidly becoming the clones of choice for top-end Cabernet plantings.

These wines will develop in bottle over the next decade at least. As they soften and bloom, they’ll offer increasingly eloquent--if fleeting--impressions of a more pleasant time.

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Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits Magazine.