by Antonio Galloni

2011 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon: Terroir Matters

The 2011 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons have turned out better than I expected. It was a challenging vintage, but the best wines will surprise readers for their aromatic intensity, finesse, balance and sense of place.  Cold, fall damp mornings with heavy fog. Typical Napa Valley harvest weather, right? Not exactly. But that is 2011, one of the strangest growing seasons I have ever seen. Anywhere. The early mornings in St. Helena, where I was staying, looked more like Piedmont than California. On the mornings I ventured to Howell Mountain and Pritchard Hill, something bizarre and beautiful happened. No more fog, no more rain. And plenty of sunshine. Above the fog line, everything was different. That was the first lesson I learned in 2011: terroir matters. Yes, there are some well-draining valley floor sites that did well, but 2011 is a year where hillside vineyards are the stars. Most importantly, 2011 is a beautiful vintage through which to discover what makes Napa Valley’s best terroirs so compelling.

Vintage 2010 Revisited

I have always had a soft spot for the 2010 vintage in Napa Valley, ever since I tasted the wines from barrel in the fall of 2011. Last year I wrote that 2010 was an epic vintage. I still feel that way today. The 2010s I tasted this year are just starting to open up, and as that happens, there is an explosiveness in the fruit that is simply dazzling.

Above: Ovid, Pritchard Hill

Vintage 2011: Let it Rain

Vintage 2011 will be remembered for many things, including heavy downpours in June that coincided with Auction Napa Valley and flowering and generally very cold and damp weather. At high-quality estates, the work started in the summer by dropping a significant amount of crop. The vines were constantly under disease pressure.

During harvest weather was changing constantly. Producers with in-house vineyard management and/or the ability to change picks at the last minute had a huge advantage over everyone else. Precocious varieties, especially Merlot, escaped with minimal damage. Winemakers were not prepared for the onset of botrytis in Cabernet Sauvignon, something few of them had seen. Interestingly, the French winemakers I visited during the harvest were pretty relaxed. They had seen it all before. But American winemakers were truly freaking out. Once the fruit was in, the sorting was brutal, in some cases with more ending up in the trash than in the crusher. Readers who want to re-visit the vintage, can do so with these short videos shot at Blankiet, Kapcsandy, Morlet, Sloan Estate and Togni.

Winemakers used every tool they had at their disposal in 2011. Tannins additions were quite normal. A number of winemakers did more co-fermentations than usual in 2011 in order to give the wines more harmony and balance from the outset. Cold soaks were virtually non-existent given the delicate quality of the skins. In most cases, winemakers pursued gentler extractions with lower temperatures and less time on the skins, but some producers went the other way and fermented with high temperatures in order to extract as much as possible, a fascinating range of stylistic choices. Because of the fear of oxidation, rackings were generally reduced. Some producers did more lees stirring to try to fatten up the wines. In many cases the 2011s were bottled earlier than normal. Readers will note the higher than normal presence of Merlot and Petit Verdot in Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines, both used to beef up the blends. In general, Merlot is the most successful variety in 2011 because it ripened before the rains.