The Memories Pour Forth

Tasting an older wine that’s still in good shape is, in a real sense, time travel. It offers a genuine connection with the past, the actual smell and flavor of fruit ripening slowly through summer days long past.

That was amply demonstrated by a recent tasting of more than 40 California Cabernets, mostly from Napa Valley, from 1940 to the present. Each was a vibrant, purple-tinted snapshot of a bygone time. Together, they showed how far the California style has evolved from the Bordeaux-style clarets of yore to the current paradigm of extremely ripe, high-alcohol wines.

The tasting was sponsored by Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in association with the American Wine History Project of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Five historians from the Smithsonian documented the tasting as part of the Institution’s Wine History Project, tracing wine in America from Thomas Jefferson’s time to the present. The wines were assembled by Zachy’s rare wine consultant, Dennis Foley, from the cellars of several longtime collectors, and the event was moderated by Bon Appetit wine editor Anthony Dias Blue.

Quite a few had aged well enough through the decades to provide a sensory trip back in time.

The jammy 1940 Simi Claret evoked the determined reawakening of Sonoma County viticulture in the aftermath of Prohibition. The 1945 Casa de Sonoma, still harmonious and silk-smooth, inspired recollections of the late August Sebastiani and the long-gone El Gavilan Winery, where he made the wine.

The 1951 Beaulieu, an elegant garnet beauty with deep luscious flavor and a long tobacco-inflected finish, moved collector George Linton, who contributed many of the BV and Inglenook wines in the tasting, to a more personal recollection. He noted that Andre Tchelistcheff’s assistant winemaker at that time was Joseph Heitz. “One day Joe told me that they had fined four barrels of the ’51 with egg whites,” recalled Linton. “So I bought some to compare with the regular gelatin-fined wine. At $1 a bottle, I could afford it.” Heitz also had a hand in the magnificent ’58 BV, one of seven wines on display from that great vintage.

Most of the others in that flight were rare cask-designated bottlings from Inglenook, also contributed by Linton. A historical mystery surrounds those bottlings. It’s believed that the letters and numbers on the labels refer to specific blends, but nobody knows exactly what they mean. According to Linton, the mystery began when John Daniels Jr. sold Inglenook to United Vintners in 1964.

“There was great resentment in the Napa Valley that Inglenook was sold to investors, rather than winemakers,” said Linton. “The rumor was that winemaker George Deuer was so angry he destroyed the cellar books. At any rate, they were never found.” Perhaps something valuable was lost with the cellar books. The ’58 Cask F-10, for example, has matured into a stunning wine. But which blocks of vines was it from, and how was it made? We’ll never know.

Inglenook, BV and Charles Krug carried the early-vintage flights, but as we moved into the late ‘60s, the first wave of smaller, so-called boutique producers showed up. Foremost among them was the legendary Heitz Cellars, with examples such as the amazing ’69 Martha’s Vineyard. The modern cult-Cab phenomenon has its roots in wines like these, although it would be another two decades before the likes of Colgin and Screaming Eagle. By the mid-’70s, there were signs of the future in noticeably more sumptuous wines from Caymus, Joseph Phelps and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars.

Controversy began with flights from the late 1980s. Those were the last vintages of the foremost Napa Valley Cabernets to be made largely according to the classical Bordeaux model. When the dust had cleared from phylloxera replanting in the early ‘90s, Napa Valley Cabernet was a very different animal.

People who discovered wine in the 1990s may assume that California Cabs have always been the rich, high-alcohol fruit bombs typical of recent years. Not so. In fact, wine style is a moving target, like fashions in food and clothing.

So one of the persistent topics of conversation among the tasters was whether the new style of Napa Valley wine will age as well as those impressively young old-timers. Will a Cabernet in the modern style--big, extracted, high-alcohol--be as lovely after 50 years in the bottle as, say, the Inglenook ‘51?

“I think we’re going for the same values, but on a greater level of magnitude,” noted Stag’s Leap proprietor Warren Winiarski. “It’s dangerous, because it’s easy to get overpowering proportions at that level. But we’re playing with the danger.”

I share many observers’ doubts about the top-heavy wines. But I would love to be able to taste, say, a ’99 Stag’s Leap Cask 23 in 2049, and admire it.

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Rod Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits magazine.