The Art of the Blend

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | JANUARY 29, 2019

Early one morning Philip Norfleet, Director of the Napa Valley Reserve, and I were discussing a series of events and tastings for 2018 and 2019. A crazy idea flashed across my mind. I asked Norfleet if I could blend a barrel of wine at the Reserve to auction off for charity. “Let me ask around,” he said. “I will get back to you soon.” I could not tell if he thought it was a good idea or not, but I was energized. A few hours later I had my response.

The Napa Valley Reserve, one of Bill Harlan’s many projects, is a private club, that, among other benefits, gives members the ability to blend their own private label wine. The Reserve works with estate vineyards in St. Helena and a few outside sites that I started to learn about over the course of doing the research for our Napa Valley Vineyard Maps. An opportunity to blend a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon was intriguing, to say the least.

Tasting a wide range of 2016s and 2017s at the Napa Valley Reserve 

Blending the 2016….

When I showed up at the Reserve a few days later I was astonished to see a huge lineup of 2016 and 2017 component wines. I thought we would do one vintage, but I had two vintages to taste through. I was frankly pretty terrified. Bob Levy, Harlan’s Director of Winegrowing, and Marco Gressi, the Reserve’s Winemaker, looked on as I started to work my way through the fourteen samples of 2016s and in front of me. It was early May 2018, so the 2016s were not super-young wines. Even so, tasting the samples blind was quite a challenge. I felt so out my element. I imagine Levy and Gressi enjoyed watching me struggle through this exercise. I probably would have, too!

The interaction of components in a blend is symbiotic and the relationships between those components, in other words, how the elements interact, is not at all predictable, at least not for a beginner. I had learned this a few years ago when I tasted dosage trials at Selosse, where I observed firsthand that the relationship between sugar and wine is non-linear. For each of those Champagnes, a sweet spot existed where the wine simply achieved its best balance. Building the blend of the 2016 was very much the same.