King Cab

Ever wonder how Cabernet Sauvignon became Napa’s
dominant grape? Credit goes to a bit of (well-timed) bad luck, a few
unwitting Frenchmen and one particularly powerful critic.

FASCINATING STORIES are often told in numbers. At the Faust Vineyard, for instance—in southern Napa Valley’s Coombsville region—94 of its 112 acres are given over to Cabernet Sauvignon. (Merlot comes in a distant second, with just over 15 acres.) Widen the lens, and the camera tells a similar story: Up and down the entire valley now, 50 percent of this storied vineyard land is planted to Cabernet. The wildly popular, richly structured red has merged identities with the region itself. Napa Valley signifies Cabernet Sauvignon, and “Napa Cab” is recognized worldwide It’s not a stretch to say that the quantity—and quality—of the one wine makes this 30- by 10-mile valley the top Cabernet-producing region in the world. (No disrespect, Latour and Lafite; your wines inspire, but you don’t send them out into the world as Cabernet Sauvignon—they’re simply Bordeaux).

Not that it was always this way. More than a few winemakers in Napa Valley are old enough to remember that Cabernet wasn’t their first choice. As recently as the 1960s, the grape came in third across the valley in terms of acres planted, behind Zinfandel and Petite Sirah. So how did this happen? Cabernet’s ascension to the throne is a tale of the forces that have shaped modern winemaking—growing expertise and developing technology, yes, but also changing consumer preferences, a rogue tasting in France, a persistent vineyard pest, and at least one savvy critic. All colluded to elevate Cabernet Sauvignon to signature status, and the wine in turn transformed Napa Valley into the world-renowned region that the endlessly-photographed sign along Highway 29 says it is.

So, why didn’t Cabernet come first?
The initial commercial wineries in this historic region are familiar names still—Charles Krug, dating to 1861, Schramsberg (1862), Beringer (1876), and Inglenook (1879). For the most part, those pioneers weren’t channeling Bordeaux (where, of course, Cabernet Sauvignon is the foremost variety); they were planting Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, a host of other French, Italian, and German varieties, and yes, some Cabernet.

While those early wine pioneers were likely just planting what they knew from their Old World heritage, those two lead reds persevered during Prohibition. Because it was legal for “heads of households” to keep fermenting in their basements—up to 200 gallons per year—some 2,000 train-car loads of grapes left the Bay Area between 1920 and 1933, heading east to home winemakers. And Zinfandel and Petite Sirah were thick skinned and hardy enough to weather the trip well. (Ironically, vineyard acreage actually increased during those “dry” years.)

From the vantage point of enjoying exquisite Napa Valley Cabernets today, it’s easy to imagine that with the repeal of Prohibition, wineries would immediately get back to the business of devoting their vineyards and cellars to making the highest-quality wine their sites were capable of. But the truth is, that is not what the American public was drinking. Remember “Hearty Burgundy”? Sold by the gallon, of course. It was jug wines like that—made from generic blends of reds— that the majority of wine drinkers consumed, well into the 1960’s. But change was on its way.

The tasting heard around the World
Regardless of popular taste, some notable Napa Cabernets were produced through those years—the likes of Beaulieu Vineyard Private Reserve and Heitz Cellar’s Martha’s Vineyard. But few beyond the most ardent inner circle knew of these beauties. Then, Paris happened.

A British wine merchant running a shop and wine school in Paris—the late, great Steven Spurrier—had taken notice of California wines. How interesting would it be, he thought, to set up a competitive tasting pitting the best France had to offer against the upstart leaders from California? The outcome of what is now known as the 1976 Judgment of Paris belongs to world wine lore at this point (see box, page 10), with two California reds making it into the judges’ top five picks—and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon claiming the number-one spot.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the French judges were not thrilled. Napa Valley, on the other hand, was floored. It had earned the sought-after public affirmation of its capacity for growing and making some of the world’s best Cabernet. Think about it. The grape needs a long growing season to ripen. Check. It needs plenty of sun. Check. And it excels in well-draining rocky and gravelly soils. There, too, Napa gets a check. For such a compact region, the valley and its benchlands boast an impressively wide range of volcanic and alluvial soils, assuring that “Napa Cab” is far from a monolith; it expresses beautifully diverse styles, derived directly from vineyard location.

Word was out about Cabernet’s potential in this California sunbelt. More experts arrived on the scene—even the French, after egos had somewhat healed. Cabernet Sauvignon began stealing the oxygen away from other varieties occupying vineyard land. And going into the 1980s, wineries proliferated throughout the valley, hanging their hat on Bordeaux’s cornerstone grape. At the beginning of the decade, only about 60 wineries were producing here; at the end, some 200.

Best bad luck ever
But then something else happened. In the early ’80s, viticulturists noticed that some vines that appeared healthy in the spring deteriorated and actually died by harvest time. It was phylloxera, a minuscule louse that attacks the roots of grapevines. (The pest had devastated European vineyards in the late 1800s, and even taken a toll on California vineyards then, too.) So pervasive was this wave of disease that nothing short of total replanting would avert Napa Valley’s demise. Within just a few years, its vineyards were almost entirely replanted, at a cost, according to some estimates, of $1.25 billion. The disaster, though, came with the mother of all silver linings. Not only did Napa’s farmers know about louse-resistant rootstocks by this time, they also had a much better understanding of what grapes grew well and where. And what they were most interested in planting was Cabernet Sauvignon, which, from the Judgment on, had distinguished itself over its red cohorts as Napa Valley’s best wine. According to Faust winemaker David Jelinek, “when you have a track record with one of the world’s ‘noble varieties’, that is what you plant.” Or in this case, replant.

It was a serendipitous time for such bad luck. Winegrowers and makers knew far more about their craft: what clones were best suited to the valley, row orientation and spacing for best sun protection and yield, microclimates and irrigation… and maybe above all, trellising. Up until then, few vines were trained on trellises. Vineyard managers relied on the old, so- called “California sprawl,” or head-pruned vines—with canopies draped downward 360° around the fruit. Post- phylloxera, they shifted to Vertical Shoot Positioning (VSP), where canopies were lifted off the fruit zone for more sun exposure, ripeness could be better managed, astringent green flavors avoided, and beautiful balance achieved in the wines. In a few short years, Napa Valley’s vineyards were re-made. And the 1980s set off a wildly experimental quest for more farming techniques (leaf pulling, cluster thinning) and cellar technology (optical sorters!) that gradually strengthened the quality of Cabernet to the exquisite reds we know today.

Parker makes his mark
In the 1990s, one man began putting the new wave of Napa Cabernets on the map in an all-new way— Robert M.Parker, Jr. Much has been said about one tastemaker shaping the palate of a whole generation of wine enthusiasts, with scores and reviews in his Wine Advocate. But the market effect of the 100-point scale the wine critic created can’t be overstated. Parker quantified the quality (whether you agreed with his assessments or not), and threw a measured spotlight on producers performing in the top ranks.

A 98, 99, or perfect-100 score earned a wine instant attention among aficionados and collectors, even those on the East Coast who had leaned toward Old World wine tastes. Napa Cabs began claiming space in the world’s best cellars.

Interestingly, those scores—from Parker and other critics who followed his 100-point blueprint—created a phenomenon of their own. As viticulturists’ ability to ripen fruit expanded, the critics rewarded the riper wines. In turn, winemakers punched up those qualities, leaving fruit to hang longer in the vineyard for higher sugar levels (and richer glycerol appeal in the mouth from the higher alcohol levels that resulted). Enter Napa’s so-called Cults—a group of wines that catapulted to the top by embodying the brawny style. Soon enough, bottles were going for thousands at auction and topping the wine lists of four-star restaurants and high-powered steakhouses favored by the Wall Street set.

It was against this backdrop that Faust made its entrance. In 1998, Agustin and Valeria Huneeus purchased virgin land in what is now the Coombsville appellation—a head-scratcher of a move at a time when lush, plump Cabs were the fashion. But with fresher, more savory Chilean wines as their heritage, “they thought they could be making an incredible cooler-climate expression of Napa Valley in Coombsville,” says estate director Jen Beloz. “They understood the potential of a cooler growing region.” And at a time when Cabernet Sauvignon had become the signature red of Napa, the idea for that blank slate of land was to plant, and eventually craft, a Cabernet-based flagship wine.

What they didn’t know was that a course correction was coming—that those big, jammy Cabs of the ’90s and early aughts that put Napa on the map weren’t always going to be the cutting-edge style. The pendulum was ready to swing.

A cooler red for today’s enthusiast
Essentially an ancient volcanic caldera, ringed on three sides by the hills at the base of the Vaca Range, the “cup and saucer” that is Coombsville captures cooling fog and breezes that swirl off nearby San Pablo Bay. It holds temperatures during the growing season some 10 degrees cooler, on average, than those farther up the valley.

The wines, as a result, retain vibrant acidity as sugar levels in the berries rise and tannins mature slowly. The cool conditions lengthen harvest and allow winemakers the chance to let the fruit hang, developing enviable complexity. The natural balance, in the end, is between ripeness and vitality, richness and freshness. It’s tempting to compare Coombsville Cabernet to Bordeaux, but Beloz won’t have it. “We stopped thinking in Old World– New World terms 10 years ago,” she says. “We don’t compare ourselves to Bordeaux.”

By the same token, Beloz and Jelinek aren’t attempting to channel any notion of popular consumer taste either, like the super-ripe, plush-fruited, high- alcohol reds of the aughts—hedonistic but ultimately generic, terroir-free. Theirs, though, is a wine that happens to align with a distinct shift in a taste for livelier, fresher Cabernets; for wines that express the nuances of the part of the valley where they were grown, without the cloak of alcohol and generic ripe fruit. It’s been their mission since day one.

“We understand what we can produce in California, in Napa Valley, and in Coombsville,” says Beloz. “Our Cabernet speaks distinctly of the place, with purity, intensity, savory minerality—and the tightest DNA fingerprint of any Napa Valley AVA.” This brighter, more restrained style is meeting wine drinkers precisely where preferences are trending.

As the best expression of a remarkable, cool- weather location, The Pact also offers that Holy Grail for winemakers: the capacity to evolve beautifully for years in the cellar, as well as a youthful appeal to pull the cork now. Jelinek revels in the balance. “I would like The Pact to be something that people both collect and pull out and drink now,” he says. “It’s not something they should put in a special little spot and never taste.” His advice: “Buy a few bottles and have one on a special occasion, then save a couple for 10 years out, maybe 20. Enjoy the life of the wine—what this vineyard has to say, how we preserved that in a way that will open up and develop for years to come.”