Cabernet Sauvignon heaven...

Napa is a unique unparalleled part of the world where great wines are made. Their biggest strength is their Cabernet Sauvignon, but many other superb wines are made here as well. Located near the west coast, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco is Napa Valley, North America’s biggest and most famous wine region. We drove up from Los Angeles, about a six-hour drive, 600 kilometers. Napa Valley lies between two mountains—most of the vineyards are found here, but there are a couple on the mountainside as well. The valley floor, an old riverbed, is full of sediments, while higher up the mountain, the earth has volcanic qualities. The differing soil is the reason why many of the wines from this area differ so greatly from one another though the vineyards perhaps lie only a few hundred meters apart. The wineries are found mostly in the northern part of Napa and can be approached from one of two roads, the 29 and the Silverado Trail. There are about 400 wineries in Napa; it would take quite a few months to visit every one of them. We succeeded in visiting twenty wineries in four days. At five wineries a day, that was an impressive feat. We tasted 118 wines in total...

On the road headed north, vineyards surrounded us from all sides. The scenery was beautiful with its rolling green hills, olive trees, and eucalyptus. Wineries followed one another enveloped in neatly kept rows of grape vines. If someone would want to buy a plot of land now, they would definitively have to reach far down into their pockets as the least expensive areas cost approximately half a million dollars an acre, barely 0.4 hectares. In the best areas, this price can reach up to two to three million dollars. Up north, after passing through cities like Yountville, Oakville, St. Helena, Calistoga, you reach the end of Napa Valley. If you proceed further, at the end of a long and winding mountain road, you reach Sonoma where everything, like Napa, is about wine, just a slightly different style. I’ll write more about Sonoma later, but for now, let’s stay in Napa. The wineries we visited we picked based on either something we read or because they were recommended by another winery. This is our fifth trip to Napa and, as it has become our custom, we first visited the Robert Mondavi Winery. Mondavi has two tasting rooms: one with simpler (and cheaper) wines – we skipped this room – and the other has their best reserve wines. On the wine list was a 2006 Pinot Noir and four reserve Cabernet Sauvignons from 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. Everyone of the wines is over 90 points, the 1999 cab, for example, received 94 points from Wine Spectator. The wines were priced at $135 at the winery. Other of the more popular wineries we visited were Grgich Winery, Rubicon Estate, Charles Krug, Benett Lane, Heitz Cellar and we also visited Opus One. I will write about each one of these separately in a later article. We tasted many very good wines, the best of which were the ever-popular Cabernet Sauvignons. We also tasted phenomenal Zinfandels and an exquisite Syrah and Merlot as well. The weakest wine across the board was the rosé where we did not find one we could say we liked. Among the whites, Chardonnay was the most popular, followed by Sauvignon Blanc. There were some nice bottles of these here and there, but most lacked crisp acidity and came out flat. But we didn’t come to Napa for these wines, but for their reds. Trends and styles are alive and changing here as well. A few years ago full-bodied, complex flavors, and heavy tannins was the trend to follow, now the wines seem more fruiter, more natural in style, and more elegantly aged in wonderful French oak. The good news is that somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, on the bottom of a container, laying in a cardboard box are quite a few bottles of Californian wine, which will also be the topic of our next wine tasting. Don't forget to sign up!

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