Vintage Retrospective: The Great 2010 Napa Valley Cabernets

BY STEPHEN TANZER | MAY 26, 2020

The Vinous vintage chart rates 2010 as the top vintage for Napa Valley Cabernet between 1991 and 2013. As my recent retrospective tasting showed, the 2010s are overdelivering on their early promise. 

As I tasted through well over a hundred California Cabernets from the 2010 vintage this spring, with steadily building excitement, I could not help thinking of . . . the 2010 red Burgundies. Both sets of wines came from mostly cool growing seasons with serious climatic challenges (variable, sometimes stormy summer weather and a cool harvest with some rain in Burgundy, and sharp heat spikes on California’s North Coast in late August and September, the first of them particularly severe). On paper, neither season could be considered a no-brainer.

And yet, in terms of the wines produced, both are spectacular at the level of the better producers: ripe but not overripe, dense but not heavy, and offering a potentially full range of the aromas (fruits, flowers, minerals, herbs, soil) inherent to their sites. The successful wines are classy, concentrated and delineated, savory as much as sweet, and firmly structured but not hard, thanks to fully ripe, broad tannins. Although both sets of wines are built for medium to long-term aging, they have never been particularly sullen or closed. It’s the rare 2010 Cabernet (or 2010 red Burgundy) that cannot be drunk with great pleasure right now—in some cases following a bit of aeration—and most of the wines are open today, if not downright beguiling. But to my palate, the most important characteristic that these two groups of wines have in common is something intangible: personality. They are wonderfully aromatic and endlessly fascinating.

Now put all thoughts of Burgundy out of your heads. This article is about Napa Valley Cabernet, in all its glory.

A striking view just before harvest 2019, Dominus in the foreground, with Blankiet in the background.

A Brief Recap of the 2010 Growing Season

As a vintage recedes in the rearview mirror, its features become increasingly hard to discern. Thus the following information borrows heavily from my initial International Wine Cellar report in 2012 on the 2010 vintage in Napa Valley, which in turn was based on my face-to-face, IRL tastings (remember those?) with dozens of producers who had the memory of the 2010 growing season and harvest fresh in their minds.