Focus on California's North Coast

By most accounts, California’s top limited-production wines, especially those that retail for less than a hundred bucks—or better still, less than fifty—continue to sell out. Some producers admit that their spring offering used to sell out in a week but took a month or more this year. Many confess to having to work harder than ever before to sell their wines, including spending more time on the road in support of their distributors and important retail accounts. But, generally speaking, they’re neither hurting nor complaining, yet. Still, one wonders about the often much more expensive Napa Valley cabernets, especially those produced in commercial quantities. As one producer of a tiny lot of wine told me in March: “There are still enough rich people buying a case of our wine to keep on their yachts.” But surely that number is rapidly dwindling, and more and more high-end wines are chasing a shrinking group of free-spending wine lovers.

Recent vintages. Two thousand seven was a moderate, textbook growing season without climate extremes, the first of two drought years. Just enough heat at the beginning of September and again toward the end of the month helped to finish off the ripening process in most sites without causing a serious drop in acidity, and most growers were able to pick at their leisure, as rains held off until mid-October. Most of the producers I visited reported that crop levels were moderate or lower than average. While most of them told me that the 2007s have more of everything than the 2006s, the wines tend to be so fleshy and seamless that their substantial ripe tannins seem to melt into their compelling fruit. As a result, many of these wines, even some of the heftiest cabernets, are likely to give early pleasure, but they generally have the tannic structure, healthy pHs and material for a long and positive evolution in bottle. On the Sonoma side, growers were thrilled with the concentration, phenolic ripeness and near-perfect sugar/acid levels of their grapes. The 2007 vintage has yielded not just outstanding pinots and chardonnays, but syrahs and zinfandels as well.