Napa Cabernet Revisited
A blind tasting of blue chips to assess how vintages ’94 through ’04 stack up today

By Jim Gordon
Photos by Robert Martinez & Van Noy Group

Napa, California -- People who buy California Cabernet by the case and want to get the fullest experience out of their purchases need answers to two big questions: 1. What should I buy? and 2. When should I drink it?

I decided to systematically research the answers to these questions for the launch of CaliforniaWineWeb.com by re-examining a select group of age-worthy Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons over the last decade-plus.  Seven benchmark Napa wineries agreed to set up vertical tastings of 11 recent vintages for me with their owners or winemakers. We tasted blind from bottles that had been bagged and shuffled so that no one knew which vintage was in which bottle. The goal was to gauge how the years 1994 to 2004 stack up against each other today, and what’s the best age at which to drink them.

The results confirmed some conventional wisdom, for example, that 2000 and 1998 really were lesser vintages, but also packed some surprises, like how fast the supposedly great 1994 vintage is now fading and how great the 1995 vintage turned out to be. More significant to me was how strongly this exercise confirmed that California Cabernet drinkers are missing something extraordinary when they consume all their bottles young.

Take the 1995 Shafer Hillside Select, for example. Better than the 1994, it’s grand and compelling while turning the corner to graceful maturity (rated 97 out of 100 points). Or see how the 1996 Phelps Insignia breathes a memorable bottle bouquet of cedar and nutmeg while still maintaining lots of fruit complexity (also rated 97). Every winery had such ah-ha moments.

(Read the Vintage Chart)

Wineries chosen for the tasting each have a minimum of 25 years of producing Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and make it in large enough quantity to be reasonably available in wine shops, restaurants, and auctions (3,000 to 20,000 cases). These wines are already widely collected and represent a mix of estate-bottled wines and those relying on various vineyards around Napa Valley to give a broader picture of the valley’s performance.

Participating wines were the following. (Please go to Napa Cabernet Close Up for individual scores, prices and other winery-specific information.)

Beaulieu Vineyard
Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Georges de Latour

Beringer Vineyards
Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Private Reserve

Duckhorn Vineyards
Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Estate Bottled

Joseph Phelps Vineyards
Red Wine Napa Valley Insignia

Robert Mondavi Winery
Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Reserve

Shafer Vineyards
Cabernet Sauvignon Stags Leap District Hillside Select

Silver Oak Cellars
Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley

1994 was a good year to start with because critics touted it highly on release and because this vintage roughly marks the time that Napa vintners entered a new phase of post-phylloxera harvests and refined winemaking techniques.

The 7 x 11 exercise effectively re-examined the existing vintage charts and pinpointed which vintages may be best to buy now, either at auction or retail. In this process the winemakers themselves freely marked down certain years, confirming that California does experience “off” vintages (like 1998) and simultaneously that some difficult years in the vineyard (like 2000) still produced a number of top-scoring and delicious wines. The research also reinforced the tendency for fresh, new potent vintages to score well when young. Yet the vintages that scored well seven to 10 years ago sometimes did not stand the test of time (like 1994).

Controlled experiment on aging

At the core of this exercise was a close observation of what happens to a wine as it ages. By doing seven vertical tastings involving wines made wholly or largely with the same varietal components and from the same sources each year, we created a controlled experiment on the sensory effects of maturation or bottle age. Each winery’s products underwent an easily detectable evolution from jammy, exuberant and thick when young, to lighter, more elegant and complex when older. Winemakers say wine is a living thing that continues to grow and change after bottling. Following this change is a sensory and intellectual exercise that has fascinated wine connoisseurs at least since the time of classical Greece.

Pinpointing the ideal time to drink a prized Cabernet depends primarily on how much you like the mature characteristics.  The average person hasn’t a clue, however, because he or she solely or mainly drinks new releases. “There’s a huge group of consumers out there who think that if it’s not young and voluptuous they won’t drink it,” said Joel Aiken, the soft-spoken director of winemaking at 106-year-old Beaulieu Vineyard. “When I host a winemaker dinner I include an older wine but don’t make a big deal about it. Typically people love the younger wine, but as the meal goes on they try the more mature one and it’s like, “Wow, I get it now.”

After tasting the Duckhorn Vineyards 1994 vintage, Margaret Duckhorn, co-founder of the St. Helena winery, described the benefits of aging this way:  “I love the aromatics of an older wine, the leather, cedar and cigar box. I could just sit and smell the wine; that jammy fruit is gone but the aroma and the texture are really nice.”

As a young wine writer 20 years ago I had the opportunity to drink Cabernets as old as 1939 from Louis M. Martini, Beaulieu, Inglenook and Charles Krug. It was a fantastic way to literally taste the history of Napa Valley, and fired a love of mature California Cabernet that has stayed with me ever since. Most people can still find opportunities to experience older wines occasionally in tasting groups, at charity events and specialty wine classes. Anyone can start to gain the experience by investing in a case of 12 or half-case of six bottles and then drinking one or two every year to follow the wine’s aging arc.

Hold the odd years

Not every Cab is destined to age for 20 years or more, but for most there’s a magical point in their evolution when they still have some of the fresh varietal flavor from the grapes, but the drying, puckering tannins have eased off and the harmonious notes of bottle bouquet that Duckhorn describes are easy to detect and enjoy. That’s why I particularly looked for this synergy in the blind tastings. The vintages of 2000, 1998, 1996, and 1994 had the most of it. In fact, Duckhorn winemaker Mark Beringer (whose family founded the Beringer winery in 1876) currently gives people this rule: “Hold your odd years and drink your evens.”

The Robert Mondavi winemaker, French-born Genevieve Janssens, believes there’s no sin in drinking her Reserve Cabernet young. She says to drink it when first released and for two to three years, but then put it away for a couple of years before going back to it. This gets you over the “dumb” or closed phase that Napa Cabernet often goes through at about age five. (A number of 1999s seem to be there now.) So, buy cases of 2002, 2001 and 2000 now, drink a bottle or two, then save the rest while you skip down to the 1996 and older vintages that you may already have in your cellar, or can buy for reasonable prices at auction.

But if all this is too complicated Daniel Baron, winemaker for Silver Oak, says the simplest guideline is to drink a great Cabernet around the wine’s 10th birthday. His 1995 vintage is a great example of that rule right now. While Baron’s fine-tuned olfactory nerves detected a bit of aldehyde (a mild defect) in that wine, I thought it was a super example of a mature year.

The assessment of vintage quality is a pocketbook issue for wineries. When Wine Spectator magazine gave 1998 Cabernets mediocre marks and two years later when Wine Advocate newsletter did the same to 2000, some wineries found it hard to move their products without lowering prices, which they resisted. Others took the criticism personally and denied that their wines had underperformed. How, they seemed to say, could our products be inferior when we own the most expensive vineyards, retain the most expensive enology consultants and by the best French barrels?

By the time most of the 2000s were released in 2003, however, many wineries had dropped their prices by as much as $20 per bottle, giving up a potential $2.4 million in retail value for each 10,000 cases. That must have hurt. It’s still a raw issue for some vintners and wine trade members, but every winemaker and vineyard manager I interviewed acknowledged that even with extraordinary measures in the vineyard, some vintages still don’t behave.

The season from hell

Shafer winemaker Elias Fernandez and president Doug Shafer described how difficult the weather was in 1998. It was a late, cool, wet spring. The vines got a late start, and then rain fell during the vines’ critical flowering period when the “set” or formation of the berries occurs. An uneven set meant that some clusters of berries would ripen before others, and if all were harvested together there would be either lean, green-tasting fruit mixed with normally ripe fruit, or over-ripe fruit mixed with normally ripe grapes. And what goes into the crusher is what goes into the wine. Three of the 1998s in this report did taste lean and early maturing, but the Duckhorn tasted fabulous and not far behind with 90-plus scores were Phelps, Mondavi and Shafer.

“If you don’t have good set weather, then you are climbing uphill all year,” said Doug Shafer. Vineyard crews can mitigate the damage by clipping off the clusters that flowered late. This cuts the yield (and thus the profits) but it makes for more concentrated wine. It helps, but it’s not a complete remedy. As Elias Fernandez observed, “Mother nature is the boss.” “It’s a blackjack game and she’s the dealer,” added Shafer.

Besides rain at flowering, the California winemaker has two other feared meteorological enemies. Searing heat of 100 degrees or more can figuratively simmer the juice in the berries, cause the vines to shut down physiologically and delay ripening. Rain can come back at harvest time and dilute the grapes’ flavors when the vine roots draw up the new moisture into the clusters. Both of these nemeses attacked Napa Valley in 1998.

“It was just a dogfight the whole season,” recalled Bob Steinhauer, the aw-shucks vineyard manager for Beringer. “It was the viticultural spring and summer from hell. One day it was 123 degrees in our Yountville vineyard. That can stall the vines for one or two weeks afterward.” But a moderately warm Indian summer prevailed in late September to “save our butts,” he said.

Steinhauer also recited the litany of woes in 2000: heat spikes in June, and then rain on nine or more days in September and October. But more wineries were prepared to handle the challenges of 2000 than they were for 1998, judging by the overall higher quality of the seven 2000s we tasted.

Daniel Baron of Silver Oak came to the iconic Oakville winery in 1994 after working at French-owned Dominus Estate in Yountville and having worked in Bordeaux for Dominus’ owner, Christian Moueix, whose family owns the legendary Chateau Petrus in Pomerol. His reality check for vintage quality is that in Bordeaux they often have dramatically problematic vintages, and they sometimes come in strings, like 1991-1994. “The vintage swings have much less amplitude in California,” he said. In Bordeaux there is a tradition of lowering prices in lesser years and describing the production as “restaurant wine” that can be sold at reasonable prices and consumed young. “It’s a disservice of the press that it wants only blockbuster California wines,” said Baron as I took the bag off his aromatic, lean and early maturing 1998. “There’s such a place for this vintage in everyday wine drinking.”

Buy ’02, ’01, and ‘99

For those who do covet blockbuster years, it’s a good time to be buying. The current offering of most high-quality Cabernet is 2002 so buy your favorites now. 2003 is bottled and waiting in the wings for release later in 2006. I rate the 2002 vintage 9 out of 10 points, and the 2003 8 out of 10. 2002 is so luscious, effusive in fruit and tempting to drink now that few bottles may survive until maturity. Consumers who buy barrel samples should also feel very confident investing in 2004, which at this age reminds me of 2001 (rated 10). The 2001s seem to have perfectly matched fruit concentration and texture. This high-level balance should add up to a vintage like 1987 or 1985 where the optimum drink window stays open for a long time.

As for the latest harvest, 2005, it’s too early to tell. Some vintners, despite a wet spring that damaged certain grape varieties and encouraged mildew in some areas, have already hyped the vintage as outstanding. It was also an unusually large harvest, which can sometimes affect quality negatively.  (We’ll taste from the barrels and follow this vintage in the coming months.)

In searching for Cabs that are already mature, the good news is that, ironically, they’re usually less expensive than the new releases. People are so eager to buy the latest, hottest vintage that the older wines are often overlooked and undervalued. Beringer’s 1995 Private Reserve, for example, scored 95 (or world-class) in the tasting and can be bought at auction for about $85 a bottle including buyer’s premium, while the not-ready-for-prime-time 2001 vintage is $100 at retail. Or what about the equally impressive Mondavi Reserve 1995 which can be found at auction for $78 while the 2001 lists for $105?

Two superb vintages that are already old enough to have proven themselves yet still young enough to be available here and there are 1999 and 1997. The former is leaner and the latter is fatter but both still represent great opportunities for enjoyment. 1995 bore out its good reputation in the tastings, as did 1996 in general, though it was more variable.

The most disappointing vintage was 1994. The wines weren’t bad, but were not thrilling for a year that Wine Advocate rates 95 out of 100 and Wine Spectator rates 97. Only the Shafer Hillside Select was truly great; the others were “on point” as winemaker Craig Williams of Joseph Phelps Vineyards said – tasty, mellow but apparently mature. Maybe the vintage is in a down phase right now, and will come back. Winemakers often observe that vintages don’t evolve in straight lines, but bounce up and down in their aging tracks. Time will tell, but I think 1994s should be drunk soon.

Since these were blind tastings, I got to rate the performance of the winemakers as well as their wines. Six out of seven said they had never tried these vintages this way and they enjoyed the challenge. It may be comforting to Cabernet lovers who have a hard time distinguishing between, say, 1999 and 2001 that the people in charge of making those wines have the same problem. One veteran enologist thought his 1994 was his 1998. Another thought the 2003 barrel sample was the 1999. I didn’t keep count, but I certainly mis-guessed a majority of the 77 wines, and I did better than a couple of the winemakers.


Overall Wine Rankings

After tasting 11 vintages from 7 wineries, a simple addition of the individual scores gives to this ranking of the wines. To see individual scores, prices and more winery-specific information, go to Napa Cabernet Close Up , or go to our Reviews page and search by winery name.

1. Joseph Phelps Vineyards Napa Valley Red Wine Insignia (tie)
1. Shafer Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon Stags Leap District Hillside Select (tie)
3. Duckhorn Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Estate Bottled
4. Beringer Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Private Reserve (tie)
4. Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Reserve (tie)
6. Beaulieu Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Georges de Latour
7. Silver Oak Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley


March 30, 2006