2008 Cabernet Sauvignon

Wine Details
Producer

Forman

Place of Origin

United States

St. Helena

Napa

Color

Red

Grape/Blend

75% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Cabernet Franc, 8% Petit Verdot, 7% Merlot

Reviews & Tasting Notes

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Drinking Window

2018 - 2029

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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.

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Drinking Window

2015 - 2026

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This wine was tasted as part of a retrospective of Forman's Cabernet Sauvignon.

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Ric Forman admitted to me that he has intentionally been picking riper fruit and that the 15.1% alcohol of his 2007 cabernet is not extreme by today's standards. Still, Forman insists that he does very little in the way of acidification, and only at the outset, never later on. He's most likely to add acid in years when it's necessary to add water "so that the water doesn't dilute the wine's acidity." With all the focus on NapaValley cabernet, I suspect that a new generation of drinkers is unfamiliar with Forman's no-malo chardonnay, typically one of the most Chablis-like examples from the region and usually long-lived. Forman whole-cluster presses his chardonnay within an hour after bringing in the fruit, stirs the lees weekly until January (then once more in February), and ages the wine on its lees for seven months or so. He makes sure there are 35 parts per million of sulfur dioxide the moment the fermentation is done, then maintains the SO2 at that level. "The wine will last 100 years," he deadpanned.