At a new, small California winery, an ethnically diverse pair are making low production Cabernet Sauvignon. Very, very good Cabernet, that is.

For those of you who are playing along at home, I’m going to introduce this article with a bit of background, because it’s several months in the making.  Also, if I don’t start out with some preliminaries, it’s going to confuse the hell out of me.

Also, since we’re going to end up connecting Oaxaca (that’s in Mexico), Napa Valley, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Opus One, Mario Bazán Cellars, and ethnic diversity, we need to make sure we’re all on the same page before we start.

Bear with me, you’re probably smarter than I am, ok?  Here’s the recap:

• During a recent Twitter Taste Live event featuring St. Supery wines, I railed a bit on my overall disappointment with Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc.  This led to a challenge of sorts from Opus One winemaker and friend-of-the-Dude Michael Silacci, who dared me to compare Napa SB wines like Toquade against their counterparts from France or New Zealand, or at least to try Toquade.
• During a recent jaunt to the Left Coast for the American Wine Bloggers Conference, I did just that (tried Toquade, I mean, not just jaunted), along with some other great Napa wines (more on that in a few minutes) when I visited Michael for dinner (he didn’t pour any Opus, by the way… jerk…!).
• In the meantime, I’d opened up a fairly sizeable barrique of worms when I highlighted the fact that there is an incredible lack of ethnic diversity in winery ownership and in winemaking in general, and discussed with you fine readers the value of writing about very small-production wines (like Toquade).

Right… that’s Twitter, TasteLive, Napa Valley SB, Opus One, the Wine Bloggers Conference, Toquade, ethnic diversity in winemaking, and my coverage of small-production wines.  Crystal clear, right?

Anyway… at that same dinner with Michael, I was introduced to another (very) small-production wine.  A red this time, from a winery owned by a Mexican-born immigrant who employs a young African-American female winemaker.

In other words, I’d hit the serendipity synchronicity jackpot.  Which means that this is the one chance I may have to piss off everybody in a single post… I cannot screw this up!

[ Editor’s note: for those who are humorless, the preceding statement is a joke; in fact, those who are humorless are probably reading the wrong blog and should leave immediately for the sake of preserving their own sanity. ]

Background setup complete – now, let’s get talking about the wine…

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If you want to understand the changing palates of the California wine consumer (that’s consumers of CA wine, not wine consumers from CA… although those two populations can certainly overlap… ok, whatever), you need to understand peaches.

That’s right.  Peaches.

Jill & Steve, the owners and winemakers at Matthiasson in Napa, are also growers and sellers of peaches.  And they can explain how tastes have changed by observing the people that buy different varieties of their peaches.

“It seems to be generational,” noted Steve when I visited the Matthiasson farm in Napa last week. “Older consumers prefer a more mild, balanced, pure peach flavor. You can eat those peaches all day long and feel refreshed every time. Younger people buy peaches that are like an explosion of fruit.  They’re high in flavor, high in acid, high in sugar, high everything – it’s tough to eat more than one of those.”

I’d argue that the same thing could be said of Napa, CA Sauvignon Blanc wines – and I basically have said that, on numerous occasions.   The majority of SB wines (in my experience, that is) being produced out of Napa are too big, too oaky, to overblown, and lack the pure SB characteristics that are the hallmark of SB fruit (grass, citrus, high acidity, minerals…).

What I learned last week in Napa was that not all Napa SB is trying to be Chardonnay in disguise.  There is some SB being produced that is excellent, well-balanced, and surprisingly refreshing.  It just happens to be a big pain in the ass to make it that way, because according to the Napa winemakers that seem to be getting SB right, by and large Napa growers are habitually picking SB way too late…

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By all accounts, the is past Saturday’s Twitter Taste Live! event, featuring selections from Napa Valley stalwart St. Supery, was a big success.  Some estimates on the event put the number of twitter event posts at greater than 700 (I’ve not seen any definitive statistics yet), which would likely make it the biggest TTL event to date in terms of raw participation.  Undoubtedly the wide availability of St. Supery wines helped to send this event over the top, in twitter terms.

No matter how you look at it, 700 tweets is a lot of exposure for St. Supery – especially when you consider that the participants needed to have the St. Supery wines in order to get the full TTL experience.

During the event, I was pleasantly surprised by St. Supery’s Sauvignon Blanc-based wines.  This is because I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc.  Which is to say, I almost love to hate Napa Valley SB because in my experience they’re way too bloated and flabby to compare with the best efforts from New Zealand and France.  I was beginning to wonder if NV SB was a fad that needed to die, sort of like Napa’s questionable experimentation with Sangiovese-based wines.  Wine geeks often refer to SB’s pungent aromas as “Cat pee,” a term I tend to avoid when describing any wine that other humans might actually want to try, but I made reference to the term during Saturday’s TTL event, when I expressed surprise at how enjoyable the St. Supery SB’s were:

I suppose I expected some measure of challenge to that statement.  I just didn’t expect it to come less than 24 hours after I’d made it…

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Search for “Cornerstone Cellars Cabernet 2004” via Google, and you will quickly notice a few things:

1. Apparently, if you post any information about Cornerstone on the web, you’re contractually obligated to use a few of the same well-produced photos of Cornerstone wine.  Sort of like how any mention of Australia in textbooks is accompanied by a picture of the Sydney Opera House.  Anyway, I’ve used the same ones in this post just in case, so I don’t get in trouble.
2. The reviews are glowing (here’s a well-written example).

So now I’m thinking, great, who needs to contribute another favorable review of this thing?  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.  But this is not a post about Cornerstone, as much as it is a post about me being a Fool, and about the subjectivity of wine tasting in general.

You see, I realized that it was important that I write about my experience with this wine, because tasting the Cornerstone made me realize just how biased I am when I’m tasting, and how much my personal tastes influence my wine recommendations and (mini) reviews.

First, let’s talk about the wine, which comes to me as a sample via Craig Camp, general manager of Cornerstone and is a fine blogger in his own right, and who I think is a good guy despite the fact that he only gave me one bottle of this wine.  Anyway, my thoughts on the 2004:

At first I got a little smoked meat on the nose, like how you might smell after eating a Bacon Explosion.  Dark, ultra-concentrated fruit.  The fruit is massive but it’s friendly, and you can smell the structure in this wine.  It comes to you like a friendly fat guy in a perfectly-tailored 3-piece suit.  This is Santa Claus on his day off, hosting a dinner party – that kind of friendly.  There is dried plum / prune action all over the place, but there’s so much else going on it’ll make your head spin.  Concentrate on one aspect, and it goes deep – like the black pepper; really hone in on it, and I swear to god it will practically make you sneeze there is so much pepper.  Hone in on the licorice and you’ll feel like you just popped open a bag of some kind of high-end black Twizzlers at the Cineplex… you get the idea.

And this is before I’ve even tasted it.

In your mouth, it’s dense.  The black fruit carries itself all the way through to the finish, which is plenty long, and it’s approachable now because the tannins are grilled-fig-wrapped-in-bacon chewy.  But they (the tannins, not the figs) give you just enough kick at the end, which reveals the whole point, unfolding in front of you like a treasure map that finally points you exactly where you need to dig: the balance of structure and intensity of fruit.  It’s almost a mind-f*ck, those last few seconds just get you right into the brain of the winemaking staff at Cornerstone.

That’s how I saw it, anyway.

So the interesting thing (for me) is, in tasting this wine, I had a fundamental realization, a small milestone in my personal wine-journey, similar to the first time I paired a buttery Chardonnay with lobster and thought, “OK, this is what everyone was talking about when they said that the right food & wine pairing makes all the difference.”

I realized that I’ve tasted that same balance of intense, focused berry fruit and velvety-chewy tannin structure before.  It’s a hallmark of Howell Mountain, which for me is the best site for growing Cabernet outside of Bordeaux.

Period.  End of discussion.  Check, please.

I’m a total fool for Howell Mountain Cab. fruit.  It’s kind of sad how much I’m Howell Mountain’s fruit bitch.  In my mind’s eye, I can imagine walking among some of the Cabernet vines of Howell Mountain, stopping to peruse a ripe cluster still on the vine, and the cluster begins to speak to me.

In this mental vision, the Howell Mountain Cab. fruit has the voice of Mr. T.:

Howell Mountain Cab Fruit: Hey. Suckah!  What kind a fool are you?

Me: <Looks around, fearing for my own sanity>.  Uhm… what?

HMCF: I asked you a question.  What kind of fool are you, suckah?!?

Me: <Leaning in closer to examine the grapes, which vaguely resemble the head of Mr. T.>.  Uhm… I dunno… why are you talking to me?  Am I drunk?

HMCF: I’ll give you the answer right now.  You a DAMN fool.

Me: Dude, that is soooo not cool…

HMCF: What other kind of fool are you?

Me: Uhm… I dunno… the drunk kind?

HMCF: WRONG, Suckah!  You MY fool!!!

Me: <collapses into fetal position; weeps>

Guess you had to be there.

Anyway…

How biased is that?  Pretty biased, probably.

If a Howell Mountain wine sucks and I review, I’m pretty sure I will say that it sucks, even if it is from Howell Mountain.  But I’m also guessing that when I taste a good Howell Mountain Cab, it’s already getting a leg up on other Cabs I might be trying around that same time.

Consider me squarely in the “wine tasting is subjective” camp.  My palate has its preferences, just like everybody else’s.  And they will probably make themselves known in my write-ups, articles, and reviews, whether I like it or not – just like every other wine writing dude and dudette out there.

Cheers, fools!