Clos Du Val Napa Valley Stags Leap District Cabernet Sauvignon 2004

I would like to wish all my readers Happy 4th of July, that is Independence Day!  While I am situated in Australia, I am and will always remain an American.  I don’t know if I’ll be moving back home while there is so much left of the world to explore, but it’s nice to visit, particularly on holidays not celebrated so much internationally, such as today and Thanksgiving (which yes, I know, is celebrated in Canada, though not on the same day).  And since getting back to the USA this year is somewhat inconvenient, I’m celebrating my pursuit of Happiness by opening a bottle of Clos Du Val Napa Valley Stags Leap District Cabernet Sauvignon 2004.

It is difficult to source a good range of wine from the USA in Australia.  A few producers are imported, but it’s just the tiniest fraction of what’s available in California.  Of the half-dozen wines from the USA that I’ve covered, I’ve only bought two here – the other four I either picked up in London or in California.  I can understand why – there’s no shortage of New World style wines produced locally, and available with a different rate of tax so they’re much more affordable.  Still, while I love Australian wines, I also like having choices.

In this case, I did have some choices, as I had this bottle delivered to the hotel of an Australian friend who was visiting California, and he kindly brought it back for me.  I picked it because I had just been reading up on the Judgement of Paris and wanted a wine from one of the producers who represented California.  I will save a fuller description of that historic event for some other time, but just quickly it was a tasting in Paris organized by then young British wine merchant Steven Spurrier (now a hugely respected gentleman of the wine trade) which pitted some top wines of California against their red Bordeaux and white Burgundy counterparts.  Tasted blind by French judges, the top red was Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and the top white Chateau Montelena, both of California.  Clos Du Val was one of the Californian reds with its very first vintage, and this is the successor to the wine tasted then, some 32 vintages later.

Given its role in establishing California on the world stage as being capable of producing fine wines to compete with the best of France, it’s somewhat ironic that Clos Du Val was founded by two Frenchmen, John Goelet and Bernard Portet.  They set about to produce top quality wine in the style of Bordeaux and spent two years searching for suitable terrior. Portlet concluded that what would become the Stags Leap AVA was just the place, and in 1972 Goelet bought 150 acres and the two of them established the winery.  Shortly thereafter they expanded to include vineyards in nearby, though much cooler, Los Carneros for the production of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.  Many vintages and awards later, they produce two lines of varietal wine at different price points, a collection of smaller volume Winemaker’s Signature wines, as well as this, their flagship.

I wrote a bit about the Stags Leap District when I covered Stags’ Leap so I won’t go into any more detail than that, except to point out that the Stags’ Leap wine was classified from the greater Napa Valley, meaning not enough of the fruit in the wine came from the District itself, while this wine is in fact classified from Stags Leap District AVA.  Likewise, we’ve seen these grape varieties before.  And as with the two other Cabernet Sauvignon based wines from California, this is also a blend, with 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Cabernet Franc and 5% Merlot.

As to this wine itself, in the glass it is clear and bright, with a deep ruby colour, beginning to transition to blood red.  It has quick, thin legs with some colour in them.  On the nose, it’s clean with medium plus intensity, a developing character with notes of sweet spice, both fresh and dried black fruits, plums and currants, plus a bit of gingerbread.  On the palate it’s dry, with notes of cocoa powder, sweet spice, dried blackcurrant, and red meat. It has medium plus acidity, medium plus very fine, velvety tannins, medium plus body, medium alcohol, a medium plus flavour intensity, and medium plus length with a cranberry finish.

While all men are created equal, such is not the case for wines.  This wine is excellent – a delicious, well balanced, strong wine, but not overpowering. There’s a great depth of flavour, and not a note out of place.  It’s also very fresh for a wine almost 8 years old.  It has good typicity, well almost – I wish every California Cabernet tasted like this, and I wish I didn’t have to bring them into Australia personally.

Moss Wood Vineyards Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2008

I had a call from Moss Wood Vineyards last week.  I thought they might be asking me to review some wines from Western Australia, as I’ve been woefully negligent, but it turns out they were looking to sell me a case or two of a recent vintage.  I wanted to buy some, but I need to sort out my cellar before I buy anything in six or twelve bottle quantities, so I had to say thank you but no.  However, I greatly enjoy their wines and have a magnum of their wine that I’m sure will be the high point of a party at some point soon.  So a day later, I ended up buying this bottle, the Moss Wood Vineyards Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2008, and I hope in some small way it will make up for not buying a case of the 2009 over the phone.

It’s past due that I write about something from Western Australia.  There’s no shortage of good wines, and in fact WA (as we tend to call it here) punches significantly above its weight in terms of international awards relative to the other states.  I think it’s largely down to my quest for interesting new varietals hasn’t really taken me to WA as the alternative grape wines there are don’t seem to make it to South Australia.  But rather than focus on why I haven’t been writing about WA, how about I start writing.

Western Australia is the biggest state in terms of landmass and fourth in population, but it has less than 5% of the grape crush.  Despite that, it grabbed almost 15% of the awards for Australia at the 2011 Decanter World Wine Awards.  So while as with all of Australia, there’s a range of quality levels across producers, WA is certainly doing well in quality.

Western Australia at present has nine wine regions, the best known of which is the home of our wine today, Margaret River.  It’s roughly 250km south of Perth just in from the coast in the southwestern corner of Australia.  It’s a temperate Mediterranean climate with maritime influences from the Indian and Southern Oceans.  Winters are wet but mild, summers warm and dry. The geography is gently hilly, and the soils are generally decomposed granite gravel loams with little organic matter.  Grapes were first planted in any quantity in 1967, and while the region is best known for Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, Semillon is more widely planted than either.  There are also significant areas of Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz and Merlot vines.

I’ve managed to taste eight wines made from Cabernet Sauvignon, three of them straight varietals, without saying much meaningful about the grape, even to cover the basics, so I’ll do that now, though I feel a bit silly doing so given that it’s the most famous grape in the world.  It is a dark, thick-skinned grape with an extremely high pip to pulp ratio.  It ripens late, and can give high yields if not carefully managed.  The thick skin provides good resistance to most diseases, though it is still vulnerable to powdery mildew.  Its home is generally considered to be the Left Bank in Bordeaux, though as my tasting history shows, it can be found throughout the world.  It is thought to prefer gravel-based soils, which can both provide additional heat required for full ripeness and can help to limit yields.  It can produce wines of great concentration, which can stand up to both oak and in some cases decades of ageing.  In Bordeaux, as well as many places making wine in that style, it’s often blended with some combination of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.

I had the pleasure of visiting Moss Wood on a trip to Margaret River a few years ago.  They have no cellar door, but my wife was invited there on business and I got to tag along.  (Yet another reason it’s better I maintain my secret identity.)  It was not a large operation, though like many Margaret River producers, their small volume is offset by their high quality.  I was reading through their history and for some reason it sounded extremely familiar, and as it turns out, for good reason.  It was founded by Bill and Sandra Pannell in the late 1960s as the second winery in Margaret River.  The Pannell name is familiar because one of their sons, Stephen Pannell, led a tasting I attended back in April.

Moss Wood operates two vineyards, Moss Wood and Ribbon Vale, just over 18HA in total, and from which they produce different labels.  They’re both unirrigated, hand pruned and hand picked, as are the handful of other local vineyards from whom Moss Wood source fruit.  Plantings include Cabernet Sauvignon, Semillon, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Merlot, with tiny amounts of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.  In addition to the Moss Wood and Ribbon Vale labels, they also produce a line called Amy’s Wines and a Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir that they travel to Victoria to make.  And while this wine says Cabernet Sauvignon on the front label, it also contains Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.

In the glass, this wine is clear and bright, with an opaque core, ruby rim, and quick, thin legs.  The nose is clean, with medium plus intensity, a developing character, and perfumed, with lots of red berries, but not so much the cassis one might expect.  It’s more soft skinned fruit, some toasty oak, and sweet spice (cinnamon and cloves).  It’s much more a Cabernet Sauvignon on the palate, with rich chocolate, cranberry, black currant, pencil shavings, and a hint of ash.  It’s dry with medium plus acidity, medium body, medium plus alcohol, medium soft tannins, medium plus flavour intensity, and a long length with pencil shavings and chocolate finish.

This is a very good wine – full of flavour and complexity, and very fresh at four years old.  The tannins area already softening, so it’s fine to drink it now, but the acidity is strong enough that I’m sure it will reward those with the patience to wait a decade.

Dominus Estate Napa Valley Napanook Vineyard 1996

It’s Valentine’s Day which calls for something special. In this case, it’s a bottle I’ve been holding on to for a while and it’s time to crack it open. This bottle of Dominus Estate Napa Valley Napanook Vineyard 1996 should be just about ready to drink.

I should write about Napa Valley AVA and Yountville, I should write about the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Cabernet Franc, the Petit Verdot, and the Merlot, I should stick to my region, grape, producer, wine format, but this is Dominus, and that’s much more interesting right now. If I’m good, I’ll go back and put in a meaningful paragraph or two for each, but really, it’s Dominus (and it’s Valentine’s Day, so I have things I need to be doing).

Dominus Estate is quite the winery, with a long history and an impressive reputation. The vineyards date to 1836, which for an American vineyard, especially in California, is exceedingly old. In 1982 Christian Moueix entered into a partnership to develop the site, which had provided premium grapes for some of Napa’s iconic wines throughout much of the 20th century, and then in 1995 he took sole ownership of the property. Moueix’s family has been famous in the French wine trade for decades, and in addition to Dominus Estates, he manages Château Pétrus which Jancis Robinson describes as the most famous wine of Pomerol and the most expensive of Bordeaux.

So if you were in charge of Château Pétrus and had just taken ownership of an excellent winery in Napa, what would you do? Build a winery, right? And who would you get to design it? How about Herzog and de Meuron, the Swiss architects who went on to design the new Tate Modern in what had been the Bankside Power Station in London (which is possibly my favourite building in the world). More recently they designed the Beijing National Stadium, better known as The Bird’s Nest. The winery is pretty amazing – it’s worth checking out some pictures if you haven’t seen it before.

Dominus Estate makes two wines, Dominus which is has produced since 1983 and a second wine, Napanook, which was first released in 1996. The label on Dominus has been pretty standard since 1991, and featured the words “Napanook Vineyard” diagonally from the bottom left to the upper right through to 1996, the vintage year of this bottle. In 1996, there was some confusion between the premier label, Dominus, with “Napanook Vineyard” across the label, and the second wine, Napanook. As a result, the following year that confusing text was changed to “Estate Bottled”.

This wine is a treasure. It’s a deep garnet in the glass, and when I decanted it there was very little sediment, even though the bottle had been stood up for a few days. The nose is fairly intense with lots of tobacco and green herbs as well as some stewed currants. The palate is very rich – more tobacco, but also red meat, rich spice, and concentrated black fruit. The tannins are smooth and fully integrated and there is an underlying zest of acidity that keeps the wine feeling fresh despite the nearly 14 years in bottle. This wine was perfect with slow cooked beef cheeks, and didn’t let up when we were on to dark chocolate ganache bars with ice cream.

Ridge Monte Bello 1992

I still need to finish the write-up of the exam, now fading fast as a distant memory.  I also want to write a bit about the upcoming CMS exam.  But you know, I recently celebrated my birthday, and had an awesome bottle of wine, and that’s far more interesting than any other topic on the agenda.

So once upon a time I lived near a wine merchant who had a small but perfectly curated shop in London.  His selection was on the high end of things, and while he also had some value wines for everyday drinking, I suspect he remained in business through a small group of regular customers who picked up a dozen cases of their favourite listed Bordeaux every year as well as the odd case of Krug when they were throwing a party.  While there were wines that he highlighted every week from the New World, they came and went, while the bulk of wines on display week in and week out were almost entirely French.

That said, he always had one or two shelves which had some wine from California, and Ridge was commonly seen on it.  I’m not sure exactly when I noticed he had the Monte Bello 1992 in particular, but it would have been roughly ten years ago.  I bought two bottles, and having had one last year, we opened up this one last night.

So I don’t know a whole lot about the wines of California, despite having spent a fair amount of time there in the days before I cared so much about wine.  I can, however, remember my first bottle of Ridge in the days leading up to the millennium at a restaurant in Colorado.  They had a dozen listed on their extensive wine list, and unfortunately it took the sommelier a few tries to bring out the exact bottle I was after.  However, the effort was worth it in the end.

Ridge is something of a legend in the annals California wine.  The Monte Bello vineyard produced its first vintage in 1892 (which makes this bottle the 100th anniversary), but Ridge Vineyards itself was founded in the 1960s by a group out of Stanford University.  Paul Draper was hired in as the winemaker.  From very humble beginnings, he quickly established Ridge Monte Bello as a world class wine, with the 1971 being featured in the Judgement of Paris tasting.

Ridge makes a number of wines, with the Monte Bello being a Cabernet dominated Bordeaux red blend.  I just had a quick look at their site and was surprised at how many other wines they have – I would have listed their Lytton Springs and Geyserville Zinfandels, but they also have ten other Zinfandels and other varietals with which I’m not yet familiar.  While they do some “estate” wines, the emphasis is very much on single vineyard productions, with each expressing as much about that particular property as possible.  I believe the Monte Bello is still their flagship.

So this bottle, as I said, already had a fair amount of age on it when I picked it up almost a decade ago, and I managed to put it away for another decade.  While in theory I wish I had been able to keep it under better conditions, it was subjected to a cross-equator move, spend some time in storage in a less than ideal environment, and undoubtedly was stood upright for a little too long on at least on occasion.  However, it’s brother bottle that was opened last year had shown well, and I retained high hopes for this one even though it took two attempts to get the entire cork out of the neck.  We had it decanted (we BYO’d this to a restaurant) and as you can see from the side of the bottle there was a fair amount of deposit.

The wine itself was still very dark in colour, with a lovely brick rim.  Over the last few months we’ve tasted a fair amount of wine, but I can’t remember the last time I had one that was a full 20 years old.  So while a recent 10 year old Bordeaux had signs of ageing, the colour of it was nowhere near as brick as this Ridge.

On the nose was a wide spectrum of lovely secondary characters.  There was tobacco, spices, chocolate, and even a hint of coffee.  The fruit wasn’t entirely gone – it had turned into a perfume of sorts.  On the palate was much the same – very rich.  It was so different as compared to drinking a wine when it’s released, that I had to stop myself and actually try to refer to the WSET tasting guide.  Nothing about the acidity or tannins made me consider them, but when I concentrated on both I was glad I did.  The acid was actually still very zingy, and the tannins were definitely there.  I didn’t initially notice either because everything was so perfectly balanced.  I don’t know for how long they had been that way, but the tannins were silky and incredibly well integrated.  An absolute joy to drink.

Having a look at the label, this blend is 80% Cabernet (Sauvignon – pet peeve when people don’t use full variety names), 11% Merlot and 9% Petit Verdot.  I can’t say I could pick out the influences of the constituent parts, but they fit together wonderfully.

I wish I had taken a photo of the back label as well, because the note from Paul Draper from 1994 when it was bottled said something along the lines of it’s fine to drink now, but will continue to develop further complexity over the next 20 years.  That’s quite a bold statement for any winemaker to put out there, but in this case he was absolutely right.  It was such a thrill to open up such a bottle and to have it at just the right time.  And it’s certainly a bit of a wake-up call in terms of having a look through my cellar as to what I should be drinking now lest I let something slip past its peak.

Connétable de Talbot Saint-Julien 2008

I put the rest of the European (that is, non-French as I did them yesterday) wine terms to understand/remember into a spreadsheet though I had planned on doing the Americas and Rest of World as well.  Alas, my time management skills are not especially focused at the moment, but they’re certainly better than they were last week.  I’m hoping for that to continue to improve between now and the exam.

I did spend some small amount of time doing a few things for this blog with the notion that it’s almost work.  Obviously, that’s not really true, and if at the end of six weeks I have a decent blog but fail my exam, it won’t be a reasonable outcome.

Tonight’s wine was the Connétable de Talbot  Saint-Julien 2008.  I’ve driven through Saint- Julien, I have no first hand experience with Château Talbot.  While I have a great deal of respect for Bordeaux as a region and brand, I don’t pretend to know much about it.  Even so, there are some things that I clearly need to demonstrate as far as knowledge.

First off, Château Talbot is in Bordeaux, which is in the southwest of France just in from the Atlantic coast.  In particular, it is in the commune of Saint-Julien, an AOC in the Médoc on what is known as the Left Bank.  The Chateau was rated as one of the ten Fourth Growth in the Classification of 1855.  It produces its grand vin, this Connétable de Talbot, and a white called Caillou Blanc.  As a Saint-Julien, Cabernet Sauvignon is the dominant grape, with Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot rounding out the blend.  The difference between this and the main wine is almost certainly fruit selection and oak treatment, with this wine receiving only 20% new oak.

First, let me start with what I would expect from a relatively young Bordeaux, because I certainly can be expected to have a generic tasting note in mind.  I would expect deep colour, concentrated, tart fruit, high acidity, a great deal of extraction, and tannins that need a few years to soften.  That note would not fit particularly well with the wine in front of me.  The colour is not overly deep, though you would not confuse it for a Pinot Noir.  The fruit is concentrated, and there is a zest to the acidity that is very refreshing.  However, it’s not overly extracted and is very approachable.  It’s a very good wine, and well suited for someone who is more used to New World styles but looking to try Bordeaux.  Here’s how it looks, smells and tasted in the glass.

Appearance

Clear and bright, with a medium ruby colour.  It leave thick, slow legs in the glass when swirled.

Nose

Clean and developing with a medium plus intensity.  There are notes of cranberry, pomegranate, fresh herbs, and sweet spice, along with a little pencil lead.

Palate

Dry, with medium-plus acidity, medium alcohol, medium-plus body, medium-plus flavour intensity, and medium fine tannins.  The flavours are of tart red fruit – cranberry, pomegranate, currant – along with some red meat and developing notes of blood and iodine along with a hint of tobacco.  The finish is cranberry with a long length.

Conclusion

This is very good quality wine – the flavours and acidity were both medium-plus which gave them balanced intensity.  Very crisp.  The length was very long, with the medium-plus carrying the cranberry flavour well after the wine was swallowed.

This is clearly an Old World wine, with restrained but very tart fruit, which will work well with developed characteristics which can be expected to emerge over the next few years.  Even so, it’s very approachable, with the acidity being zingy instead of piercing and the tannins being softer than I would have expected.    The acid and Cabernet put it in Bordeaux on the Left Bank.  This wine sells for roughly $25.00 and is good value at that price.

Readiness to drink – fine now though will improve over the next five years.  There are only hints at secondary characters that I think will round out the drinking experience.  The tannins are soft enough to enjoy now, but I think some patience will be rewarded.