2010 Cabernet Sauvignon Her Majesty's Secret Service

Aaron Pott, who spent the mid-1990s working at Chateau Troplong-Mondot in St. Emilion, is the not-so-secret consulting winemaker behind such Napa Valley producers as Blackbird, Fisher, Krupp Brothers, Quixote and Bello Family Vineyards.He specializes in Bordeaux varieties for his own label.Pott carries out a pre-fermentation cold soak for most of his cabernets, and the long skin contact includes a lot of post-fermentation maceration:up to 40 days in 2010 and 60 in 2012, a year he says brought a lot of seed tannins.He typically ages his wines in about 50% new oak, the rest once-used.Pott describes 2010 as the coldest vintage since 1991."It was hard to ripen the fruit in the southern end of the valley," he told me."A lot of people opened their canopies and got caught by the late August heat spike; those who didn't got fresher, floral wines with a slight green component.Two thousand eleven wasn't too cold but it certainly had a cold ending.The '11s won't have the texture or longevity of the 2010s, or the tannic structure."Interestingly, Pott maintained that cabernet sauvignon picked after the rain in 2011 was "much better."

I was deeply struck by Aaron Pott's wines this year. The 2010s are terrific, but the bigger story, at least today, is how promising the 2011s are. Pott sources fruit from a handful of top sites, including Stagecoach (on the Pritchard Hill-Atlas Peak border), Quixote (Stags' Leap) and Greer (Rutherford).