Napa is a warm, sunny place, and I love wines that embrace the region’s natural generosity without sacrificing structure. Speaking of ripe but balanced Napa Valley wines, I have tasted so many of those in recent vintages, and it’s awesome. What I’m drinking Rafael et Fils Cabernet Sauvignon Oak Knoll District Napa Valley Devin Cruz But what if they are actually perfect expressions of time? If great wine’s imperative is to convey a sense of time and place, then sure, the 2004s we tasted may have failed to convey a sense of place. Is it fair to hold 2004 wines to 2019’s standards of taste? Why can’t we see them as a memento of a different time? In other cultural arenas, we look at outdated trends - neon-colored Lycra from the 1980s, say - with nostalgia, not disdain. (And to be clear: When they’re balanced, I love big and ripe wines - I mean, who doesn’t?!) I wasn’t quite able to say that, as you’ll see if you read the piece.īut something about my distaste for the wines was still nagging at me. Going into the tasting, I wanted to be able to say that even though they were big and ripe, they had their own equilibrium. Truly, I wanted to love the 2004 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons. So I loved the idea of turning that genre on its head, of writing a retrospective article that looked beyond the minutiae of individual wines and vintage conditions (yawn!) - that could actually tell a story about a year.Īnd what I found, as I dove deeper into my research, was that the 2004 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons tell the story of the year 2004 brilliantly: These lush, heady wines convey the luxurious fever-dream quality that permeated our culture in that moment. Frankly, I find retrospective tasting articles boring. The intended audience of such an article, I guess, is a wine collector who has been holding onto older bottles in his cellar and is wondering when might be the optimal time to open them. This sort of tasting is something that wine publications do all the time, for a genre of article we might call the “retrospective,” in which a critic revisits a region’s wines from a specific bygone year. That decade has taken a real beating from the critical wine establishment lately - everyone seems to agree that the wines of that era got too ripe, too big, too alcoholic - and so I thought it would be fun to test that widely held assumption with the bottles on hand. The idea for the story occurred to me early this year when I was doing an inventory of The Chronicle’s wine cellar and discovered that we had quite a few Napa Valley wines from the mid-aughts.
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