Lest I be seen as too much of a Jihadist this week, I want to recommend an MS-gang podcast. Slow day, or should I just say unproductive? Anyhow, over lunch I listened to this one:
Tim Mondavi is well known to most of you, John Williams makes wine at Frog’s Leap, and Kelli White does the list at Press Restaurant in St. Helena, which has a deep cellar of old vintages:
The podcast offered some very interesting perspective on post-Prohibition winemaking in Napa. It highlit some things that I’d known, but brought more clarity to some others of which I’d only been vaguely aware.
Some of my key takeaways:
Note the awful state of most wineries after Prohibition—barrels that had been dry for a decade or more, loss of knowledge, loss of continuity, all the rest. It took a long time to recover, relearn. Tim Mondavi described "repression of fault" as the main motivator of the early post-Prohibition decades. Quality only regained prominence as a goal for most wineries in the '60s and '70s.
But note also that most post-Prohibition wine was fortified crap (among other things, it was more microbiologically stable). Your Mad Dog doesn’t referment. Dry unfortified wine took a long time to gain traction.
In re: the great wines of the 1970s, often celebrated here and elsewhere (and remembered well by Lou, me, and the two other old guys on the board). With the slow market uptake for Napa, these wines were made from old vines that were dry farmed. The vines were often virused, further limiting fertility and alcohol. John Williams claims that the old guys would exaggerate the alcohol on the label (!).
In the ‘70s, new barrels were a sign of quality commitment—you weren’t just using your dirty old stuff, you aspired to clean production and good wine even at an expense.
There was some debate about whether the Paris Tasting of 1976 had been a good thing or a bad--maybe the industry wasn't ready, maybe it got too ambitious, maybe a monoculture of Cabernet Sauvignon wasn't the optimal use of the Valley, despite the recognition and money that it brought in.
Irrigation was introduced in the mid-late 1970s, and spray irrigation caught on in the frosts of 1980, when it was used to protect against cold nights (until the pond ran dry). Modern drip irrigation may be the biggest change in the Valley (credit to Beckstoffer & Co. for the introduction). First seen as a way to help establish new plantings on marginal soils, but rapidly noted as a way to increase yields. This was particularly favored by the economic arrangements of the time (and now), with growers selling by the ton to makers.
Vines in those days were mostly on two rupestris rootstocks: St. George and the infamous AxR (Armand x Rupestris, thus with some vinifera ancestry). Some questioned whether AxR fell victim to a new biotype of phylloxera, or whether drip irrigation brought the roots to the surface and made these vines more vulnerable to the louse (or, I would add, perhaps both in a synergistic ecological way). Vines on St. George became vigorous with too much water and grew superficial roots—drip irrigation gave green, herbal Cabernet from St. George. This was even more true in the deeper soils that were coming into new plantation as the Cabernet acreage expanded in the Valley in the wake of the Paris Tasting. So the vines making wines in the ‘80s were often much younger than those that made the great wines of earlier decades, and they were increasingly irrigated. I had historically attributed the thin, hollow character of a lot of mid-'80s Napa Cabernet to the introduction of a lot of cellar machinery, filters, centrifuges, and the like, but it seems that I had underestimated the importance of the new grapes.
The new plantations in the ‘80s and ‘90s (including the massive replacement of phylloxera-affected vines) went away from AxR and St. George to riparian rootstocks that tend to shallow root patterns. These vines may indeed require irrigation to grow in Napa.
The combination of young vines, irrigation, deeper fertile soils, and so on led to more vigor in the wines of the mid-late ‘80s, and hence more herbaceous flavors in thinner wines. At the end of the day, this was not a great flavor profile, and there was a backlash against it. The trend to bigger, richer, and riper wines followed in the ‘90s, often from irrigated young vines. Any drive up the Valley in recent years has been very sobering for me—the depressing sight of endless rows of irrigated young vines in the flats.
But the overview of vine age, rootstock and irrigation offered an extra layer to what we’ve all bemoaned as stylistic choices in Napa in recent decades—not everything was done in the cellar, or even at picking, but the changes reflect the state of the vines and water.
It is not an entirely encouraging picture from this consumer’s point of view, of course. The rootstock choices that were made in the big replanting are not easily reversed, and dry farming may remain an option only for those who have the right vines.
But all in all, thought-provoking for me.
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guildpodcast.com
Tim Mondavi is well known to most of you, John Williams makes wine at Frog’s Leap, and Kelli White does the list at Press Restaurant in St. Helena, which has a deep cellar of old vintages:
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www.pressnapavalley.com
The podcast offered some very interesting perspective on post-Prohibition winemaking in Napa. It highlit some things that I’d known, but brought more clarity to some others of which I’d only been vaguely aware.
Some of my key takeaways:
Note the awful state of most wineries after Prohibition—barrels that had been dry for a decade or more, loss of knowledge, loss of continuity, all the rest. It took a long time to recover, relearn. Tim Mondavi described "repression of fault" as the main motivator of the early post-Prohibition decades. Quality only regained prominence as a goal for most wineries in the '60s and '70s.
But note also that most post-Prohibition wine was fortified crap (among other things, it was more microbiologically stable). Your Mad Dog doesn’t referment. Dry unfortified wine took a long time to gain traction.
In re: the great wines of the 1970s, often celebrated here and elsewhere (and remembered well by Lou, me, and the two other old guys on the board). With the slow market uptake for Napa, these wines were made from old vines that were dry farmed. The vines were often virused, further limiting fertility and alcohol. John Williams claims that the old guys would exaggerate the alcohol on the label (!).
In the ‘70s, new barrels were a sign of quality commitment—you weren’t just using your dirty old stuff, you aspired to clean production and good wine even at an expense.
There was some debate about whether the Paris Tasting of 1976 had been a good thing or a bad--maybe the industry wasn't ready, maybe it got too ambitious, maybe a monoculture of Cabernet Sauvignon wasn't the optimal use of the Valley, despite the recognition and money that it brought in.
Irrigation was introduced in the mid-late 1970s, and spray irrigation caught on in the frosts of 1980, when it was used to protect against cold nights (until the pond ran dry). Modern drip irrigation may be the biggest change in the Valley (credit to Beckstoffer & Co. for the introduction). First seen as a way to help establish new plantings on marginal soils, but rapidly noted as a way to increase yields. This was particularly favored by the economic arrangements of the time (and now), with growers selling by the ton to makers.
Vines in those days were mostly on two rupestris rootstocks: St. George and the infamous AxR (Armand x Rupestris, thus with some vinifera ancestry). Some questioned whether AxR fell victim to a new biotype of phylloxera, or whether drip irrigation brought the roots to the surface and made these vines more vulnerable to the louse (or, I would add, perhaps both in a synergistic ecological way). Vines on St. George became vigorous with too much water and grew superficial roots—drip irrigation gave green, herbal Cabernet from St. George. This was even more true in the deeper soils that were coming into new plantation as the Cabernet acreage expanded in the Valley in the wake of the Paris Tasting. So the vines making wines in the ‘80s were often much younger than those that made the great wines of earlier decades, and they were increasingly irrigated. I had historically attributed the thin, hollow character of a lot of mid-'80s Napa Cabernet to the introduction of a lot of cellar machinery, filters, centrifuges, and the like, but it seems that I had underestimated the importance of the new grapes.
The new plantations in the ‘80s and ‘90s (including the massive replacement of phylloxera-affected vines) went away from AxR and St. George to riparian rootstocks that tend to shallow root patterns. These vines may indeed require irrigation to grow in Napa.
The combination of young vines, irrigation, deeper fertile soils, and so on led to more vigor in the wines of the mid-late ‘80s, and hence more herbaceous flavors in thinner wines. At the end of the day, this was not a great flavor profile, and there was a backlash against it. The trend to bigger, richer, and riper wines followed in the ‘90s, often from irrigated young vines. Any drive up the Valley in recent years has been very sobering for me—the depressing sight of endless rows of irrigated young vines in the flats.
But the overview of vine age, rootstock and irrigation offered an extra layer to what we’ve all bemoaned as stylistic choices in Napa in recent decades—not everything was done in the cellar, or even at picking, but the changes reflect the state of the vines and water.
It is not an entirely encouraging picture from this consumer’s point of view, of course. The rootstock choices that were made in the big replanting are not easily reversed, and dry farming may remain an option only for those who have the right vines.
But all in all, thought-provoking for me.
