Wine & Spirits - December 2013 - (Page 8)
FINED&
filtered
Hot & Cold:
The 2010 Napa Cabernets
Tod Mostero, the estate director at Dominus, calls 2010 "the most difficult vintage I've ever seen." Things started
off cool and wet, and stayed cool throughout most of the summer. While an average year brings a number of highs
over 100 degrees by mid-August, in 2010 most summer days didn't even push 90. (Typical for Napa, nights were
cool, with lows around 50). Until the even colder 2011, it stood out as the coolest Napa vintage in recent memory.
"The good wines will be
based on experience."
-Elias Fernandez,
winemaker,
Shafer Vineyards
But that's not the whole story.
August 24th threw a wrench into
the works: with vineyards already
well into veraison, an intense heat
wave hit Napa. The thermometer at
Dominus's Napanook Vineyard-
in Yountville, not one of Napa's
warmest pockets-hit 106.8 degrees.
Most vineyards throughout the
valley, especially those that had
already been thinned of leaves to
promote ripening, experienced
severe sunburn. In some cases the
heat was intense enough to scorch
the rachis (the connection between
the cluster and the shoot), killing off
entire clusters. The cabernet franc at
Napanook was hit particularly hard,
and for the first time in over 20
years, Dominus was made without
any cabernet franc.
"It wasn't just the heat spike,"
Mostero says. "It was the warm,
dry conditions of September and
October, and vines that were
trying to react to those warm
temperatures. You didn't really get a
nice, slow ripening; you got a lot of
herbal notes from things not being
completely ripe, and then cooked
notes. It gave you something kind of
complex, but from the addition of
herbal and cooked. Beyond that, it
gave you very high tannins and very
high color. It was sort of flashy, dark,
deep."
For growers who had the luxury
of being selective, underripeness
wasn't much of an issue despite
the tepid weather, and raisined
berries could be sorted out. Maybe
fearing overly austere wines, some
winemakers seem to have plumped
up their wines by leaving a bit
of residual sugar. But the more
carefully made, site-driven wines
of the vintage are impressively
structured and often driven by
savory earth tones as much as overt
fruit, suited to a long evolution in
the cellar.
The vintage certainly played into
Cathy Corison's hand. Her cabernet
is grown exclusively on the warm,
The more carefully made, site-driven wines of the
vintage are impressively structured and often
driven by savory earth tones as much as overt fruit,
suited to a long evolution in the cellar.
8
WINE & SPIRITS
DECEMBER 2013
cobbly benchlands of western
Rutherford and St. Helena. Her
sites (and a philosophy of picking
at lower sugars compared to many
of her Napa counterparts) meant
that she didn't have a problem
bringing in ripe fruit in 2010. Like
most everyone else, she had to deal
with sunburn, sending out crews the
day before harvest to literally scrape
off the raisined sides of damaged
clusters. Still, it's the coolness of the
year, more than the heat, that shows
through in her 2010 Napa Valley
Cabernet. "It's concentrated and it
does have that mineral quality that
I love-I think that comes from the
long, cool season," Corison says.
(See page 62 for our critic's take on
the wine.)
In other areas of Napa, despite
the August heat wave and some
warmer days in September and
October, ripeness wasn't a given. As
veraison hit, the team at Shafer was
concerned about their Borderline
Vineyard, at the cool southern
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - December 2013
Wine & Spirits - December 2013
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered
Acid Trips
The Great Whiskey Shortage of 2013
Spirits
Gadgets and Gi
New Destinations
Where to Eat & Drink in Seattle
Turning Champagne into Wine
Barolo & Formaggio
Douro, No Apologies
Walla Walla Cabernet
The Best for $10 or Less
Overview
Champagne
US Sparkling Wine
US Cabernet Sauvignon
Alsace
German Riesling
2011 Vintage Port
Barolo & Barbaresco
Rioja
US New Releases
International New Releases
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