The 2021 Napa Valley Cabernets, Part One

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | DECEMBER 21, 2023

After the brutal 2020 vintage, Napa Valley fans will be thrilled to start exploring the 2021s. The 2021s are aromatic, refined and wonderfully expressive. I found many wines to be truly exceptional both in terms of quality and what seems to be a more finessed approach than in the past, something that is evident at many estates. Vintage 2022 presented more than its fair share of challenges, so 2021 is most certainly the vintage to focus on, at least for the time being.

A serene late afternoon view of Lake Hennessey from Chappellet.

The 2021 Growing Season

The story of a vintage is rarely the story of a single year. Often it is a story of the preceding years. That is very much the case with 2021. I have written it before many times, but it bears repeating. The vine does not automatically reset each January 1; rather, it has a long-term memory of what has taken place in the past, especially the recent past. One of the keys to understanding 2021 is that it follows 2020, a year of severe heat stress and then a whole range of issues related to fires, from lack of sunshine to, in the worst of cases, actual damage from fire. For the sake of convenience, I will reproduce a passage from my article Napa Valley: The Frantic 2020s & Stunning 2021s, published in February of this year below.

“The lack of sunshine in 2020 meant that the vines simply did not store the same amount of carbohydrates they usually do,” explained winemaker Nigel Kinsman. “This is especially true of cane-pruned vineyards, where there is less wood (and therefore less potential to store carbohydrates), as opposed to cordon-trained vines, where there is more wood,” he added. “In 2021, the vines responded to the accumulated stress of several years of drought by regulating themselves, with the most critical period being the late spring and early summer of the preceding year, when potential yields are set,” vineyard manager Mike Wolf elaborated. “We had shorter shoots and smaller canopies to work with. Because of that, we had to thin the crop to match crop loads with what the vines could ripen. A final blast of heat at the end caused further dehydration." Water, or lack thereof, was another issue. Irrigation can only help to a degree. Increasingly, though, water is scarce. In the most dramatic of cases, it was simply shut off by the county. 

“Overall, 2021 was a relatively cool year,” Cathy Corison commented. “Temperatures were moderate in August. We only had one week of high temperatures.” Other winemakers offer a slightly different perspective. “The 2021 growing season was consistently warm, but we had no real heat spikes to speak of," Tod Mostero told me at Dominus. Harvest was once again on the early side. Moderate temperatures throughout most of the summer led to long harvests at many estates. “Our harvest stretched out over a month,” Winemaker Allison Tauziet explained at Colgin. Low yields, small berries and high level of tannin meant the wines extracted easily. Many winemakers reported easing off on extractions to avoid overly tannic wines.