2011 Faust Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, Calif.
$55
Two Thumbs Way Up
Aromas of tart raspberries, violets with subtle smoky notes. It has bright red and dark berry flavors with a zingy acidity and a touch of butterscotch, cloves and milk chocolate.
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“Jealous.” That’s the first word winemakers outside Napa Valley say when asked about growing conditions in California’s most renowned wine region.
“Off” years in Napa would rank as stellar vintages anywhere else. Every growing season, Napa is blessed with warm days, cool nights and rain seemingly only when needed. Well, almost every growing season.
Back in July, I had the good fortune to be in Napa Valley for the Rutherford Dust Society’s annual grand tasting. A dozen or so journalists and wine industry people gathered to taste the cabernet sauvignon-based wines of Rutherford, Calif., home to celebrated wineries and vineyards such as Beaulieu, Cakebread, Winston Hill/Frank Family, Beckstoffer and Inglenook, the location of this year’s tasting.
We tasted 13 wines from the 2011 vintage. These wines were selected by board members of the Rutherford Dust Society, the region’s grower and winemaker association. But before we got started, we got the bad news from Dave Piña of Piña Vineyard Management Co., who addressed the group: “This was a (cough) challenging year.”
That was the understatement of the day. From the cool, rainy spring to the cool, cloudy summer to the cool, rainy harvest, grape growers worked desperately to produce anything worth picking in conditions none of them had ever experienced, at least in this part of the world. Winemakers (and winery owners) watched nervously.
"We really had to work hard to earn our keep [in 2011]," said Tom Rinaldi, director of winemaking for Provenance Vineyards, who has been making wine in Napa Valley for over 30 years. Rinaldi compared the growing conditions of the 2011 vintage — the likes of which he's never seen — to those regularly faced by his counterparts in Bordeaux.
Of course, wine was made and the news is not all bad. As we went about our business swirling and swishing, words like delicate, nuanced and subtle ricocheted around stone walls of the historic Inglenook château. Most of the tasters tasted the wines blind to remain as impartial as possible.
Nuanced? Subtle? Not your typical descriptors for a California cabernet sauvignon, let alone one from Napa Valley, long-known for its muscular, dark and intense wines. Due to the slim pickings in the vineyard, winemakers had to be unbelievably selective as to which barrels made it into the blends of their flagship wines. (And though you’d never get anyone to say this publicly, some winemakers used wines from the excellent and abundant 2010 vintage to “round out” their 2011s.)
If you look at the ratings charts for 2011, you won’t see encouraging scores. I, however, tasted a silver lining. For the longest time, I’ve rarely seen a place for brawny, high-alcohol cabernet sauvignons at the dinner table. They tend to overshadow most dishes, except for grilled, highly seasoned, medium-rare steaks. These 2011 wines had a grace to them, flavors and aromas that I find more interesting than alcohol and blackberry concentrate.
I asked several of the organizers if this could be the start of a trend away from overpowering, alcoholic wines (alcohol levels, on average, of all the wines at the tasting were 1 percent lower than historic norms). They doubted it, although a couple winemakers and winery owners did say that they are seeing some push back from consumers concerning elevated alcohol levels. It will be a very long time, however, before we will regularly see wines in the 12 percent to 13 percent alcohol range.
As the 2011 Napa vintage proves, "nuanced" and "subtle" aren't necessarily code words for thin and wimpy. Now, that is something to be jealous of.
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