2008 Cabernet Sauvignon

It is always a pleasure to stop by Togni. Philip and Birgitta craft beautiful, classically inspired wines from their small vineyard on Spring Mountain. The flagship Cabernet Sauvignon, or 'main label,' as the Togni's call it, is terrific in both 2017 and 2016. Readers will also find much to like in the entry-level Tanbark Hill Cabernet Sauvignon, which is quite strong in 2016. Sadly, yields are down 35% in 2016, so interested readers should consider picking up these wines while they are around. Togni is one of the very few Napa Valley wineries to keep a small library of older wines that are re-released each year to a handful of clients. The library releases I tasted this year - 2008, 1998 and 1988 - show just how well these wines age, and indeed, how much time they need to truly be at their best.

As the challenges of difficult growing seasons fade with time, two things happen. First, in the memory of winemakers, rain events magically become less extreme: the actual torrential rainfall that plagued a harvest shrinks to moderate precipitation and eventually to a vague recollection of moisture. Freakishly cool or brutally hot harvest weather or damaging hail storms are virtually forgotten, as the body has a short memory for pain. At the same time, as the wines themselves mature and are transformed, they reveal themselves to be less extreme after all, until at some point it can be next to impossible to find the insanity of the vintage in the bottle. I’ve seen these patterns play out again and again in temperate wine-growing areas like Bordeaux, Burgundy and northern Italy—and even in normally hot, bone-dry growing regions. Two thousand eight was such a year for California’s North Coast.

"Two thousand eight was an early year all around," said Philip Togni. "We had some frost damage, which we've never seen before, but there was no shriveling of the grapes during the summer up here on Spring Mountain." The harvest began on September 5, or nearly three weeks earlier than in 2009. By the way, long-time fans of the Togni cabernet might want to look for next September's library release of the superb 2001, which is evolving at a snail's pace.

Philip Togni told me that frost reduced the 2008 crop by a full 10%, which is very unusual this far up SpringMountain. In recent years, Togni and daughter Lisa, who has been steadily taking over winemaking duties here, have been "a bit less cautious with fermentation temperatures." The result, he says, is more extraction, but one advantage may be that more alcohol is "boiled off." He's now pressing more cautiously, almost immediately after the end of the fermentation, "according to taste."