Kapcsándy Merlot Roberta’s Reserve and Cabernet Sauvignon Grand Vin
BY STEPHEN TANZER |
On more than one occasion, I have singled out the Kapcsándy Family Winery’s Roberta’s Reserve as one of the world’s greatest Merlot bottlings not made on the Pomerol plateau, and arguably the finest example from California. It’s a Merlot with extraordinary depth of flavor and structure, and it appears capable of evolving in bottle for at least two or three decades. In some vintages the wine has even overshadowed the estate’s Cabernet Sauvignon Grand Vin in the early going for its uncommon depth and perfumed complexity. But a stellar vertical tasting of these two elite bottlings side by side at the winery in March proved that the Kapcsándy family’s outstanding Yountville site excels with both varieties. Their two flagship bottlings show remarkable density and refinement of texture, outstanding small-berry intensity and depth, and uncommonly suave tannins. If my scores seem ridiculously high, that’s because the wines are ridiculously good—and far more impressive than wines from young vines (the oldest will be 18 this year) have any right to be.
The first Roberta’s Reserve was made in 2005. This was also the first vintage from which the estate bottled a varietally labeled Cabernet Sauvignon—actually, “Grand Vin” was not indicated on the label until the 2007 release. In its first two vintages of production, the winery had offered just a single Cabernet-based proprietary blend, which included 10% Merlot in 2003 and 40% in 2004.
The no-nonsense Kapcsándy winery
The Origins of the Kapcsándy Project
Lou Kapcsándy came to America from his native Hungary following the Soviet invasion in 1956, and quickly converted his degree in chemical engineering to an American one at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, going to work as a junior chemical engineer. He subsequently moved to California’s Bay Area, where he worked in the petroleum and pharmaceuticals industries. In 1974, he relocated with his wife and young son, Louis Jr., to Seattle, where he eventually ran a general industrial contracting company and was involved in the construction of a couple of wineries in Woodinville.
Throughout his adult life, Kapcsándy had been a wine lover, with a particular fondness for Bordeaux, but his involvement with wine would eventually become far more hands-on. Kapcsándy cited a long lunch with Château Léoville-Las Cases proprietor Michel Delon in 1999 as the trigger for his going into the wine business (one reason for this decision was so that he could buy Delon’s wines). He established a small wine importing business, Grand Cru Imports, specializing in Bordeaux and Hungary’s Tokaj wines.
Meanwhile, Kapcsándy was also thinking about buying a vineyard in Napa Valley as a retirement project, initially with no plans to make wine himself. In 2000, the State Lane Vineyard in eastern Yountville, about a half mile inside the Silverado Trail, came to his attention. This 20-acre site, owned by a retired California highway patrolman who had purchased it in 1993, had supplied Beringer Vineyards with a core component for its flagship Cabernet Sauvignon Private Reserve through the 1980s and continued to be used to make smaller-production vineyard-designated Cabernets in the ‘90s. Beringer had recently ripped out the vines due to the spread of phylloxera and had a plan to replant them. Kapcsándy had heard through friends that the site was available and he snapped it up. “I couldn’t believe that Beringer wasn’t all over it,” he told me in March.
The Kapcsándy vine rows are planted magnetic north-south
The Early Years of a Great New Estate
In less than 20 years, the Kapcsándy family has created two flagship wines that can stand with the world’s finest Cabernets and Merlots. This double vertical of the flagship Merlot Roberta’s Reserve and Cabernet Sauvignon Grand Vin provided a unique opportunity to trace the history of the winery back to the early days.
