El Nino Cabs

Michelangelo once said the statue is inside the stone and the job of the sculptor is to find it.

Shafer Vineyards winemaker Elias Fernandez, winner of the recent Press Democrat 10-year-old cabernet sauvignon retrospective, said Michelangelo’s philosophy inspired him to make a great cabernet in 1998, the most challenging vintage of the 1990s.

“It’s a similar situation for a winemaker,” Fernandez said. “There’s a great wine in the vineyard. It’s our job to find it.”

Fernandez’s masterpiece was the Shafer Hillside Select, 1998 Stags Leap District, Napa Valley, earning 4.5 stars. It outshined second-place winner, the Hess Collection, 1998 Napa Valley, also rated 4.5 stars, while third place went to Joseph Phelps Insignia, 1998 Napa Valley, at 4 stars.

The blind tasting of 24 cabs from Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino was suspenseful, considering the grapes in these bottlings were survivors of an El Niño year, with torrential rains and unseasonably cool temperatures.

When the wines were first released, wine critic Robert Parker gave the vintage an 85 rating, noting that for cabernet it was “the most irregular in quality since 1989. ... However, this is not to suggest that there weren’t some superstar wines produced in 1998.”

At their 10-year mark, the unbagged bottles revealed that the top names in Napa Valley cabernet were striking, and they’re aging well for the short term. That said, the majority of the cabs were less inviting. They were a bit too herbal and not well suited for aging. (See our tasting grid on page D2.)

California cabernets with good balance and solid structure on release are expected to show well at their 10-year mark, emulating the great wines of Bordeaux that can last decades in the bottle. Structure is about the backbone of a red wine — the tannins and other factors that determine its texture. A balanced wine is one in which no one particular flavor or characteristic is so strong that it dominates or overshadows others.

Ben Pearson, wine buyer for Bottle Barn in Santa Rosa, wasn’t surprised that the most respected names in Napa Valley cabernet rose to the top. “The great estates, the great producers, they usually have a track record that is well deserved.”

But Pearson said the problem for many producers in 1998 was that the grapes didn’t ripen in every aspect. “They just didn’t have layered flavors that other top vintages had.”

Pearson recalls that, on release and for years afterward, the ’98s were the favorite giveaway wines at fund-raising events in Wine Country, suggesting collectors weren’t interested in holding onto them. “For several years, every (silent auction) table was loaded with 1998s,” he said.

Some wineries didn’t even make a 1998 bottling — a possibility that was up for discussion at Shafer, “which was a hard thing to face,” Fernandez said.

What Fernandez and his team decided to do instead was sculpt the vineyard.

“One of the key things to producing wine that’s rich and flavorful is to make sure that at harvest you’re only crushing fruit that is uniformly ripe,” he explained.

“What changed for us in 1998 was that beyond clipping away fruit, we went even further into the berry selection, going cluster by cluster and pulling out individual grapes that weren’t on track for full ripeness,” he added.

Fernandez joked that by the time they made his final blend, “the wine we bottled had essentially qualified for the Olympics of wine — having made it through rain, heat, and our own thinning and berry selection, having made it through the intense selection process in the cellar and so forth.”

The winemaker said experience is key when battling Mother Nature. “We’ve seen it all,” Fernandez said. “And we’ve got strategies for dealing with every curve nature throws at us.”

One of the most important strategies was to sacrifice fruit to preserve the reputation of the brand.

“So picture this,” Fernandez said. “On a hillside vineyard in which nature often gives us only 1½ tons per acre, in 1998 we thinned our crop dramatically, then lost another half to the July heat spike. This means that half of our crop dropped to the ground and became fertilizer. I think by harvest we averaged about ¾ of a ton per acre.”

Fernandez knows his way around vineyards. As a kid, before attending UC Davis, he worked alongside his parents at local vineyards and orchards. “By the time I studied enology at Davis, I already knew how to prune and train vines. ... Experience accounts for the consistency of Shafer wines.”

Shafer Vineyards Hillside Select 1997 Cabernet won first place in last year’s retrospective, and the 1993 won second place in the 2003 retrospective.

“Of the Hillside Selects,” Fernandez said, “I’m most proud of the 1998. It was a tough year, and I believe we produced a wine of elegance.”

You can reach Staff Writer Peg Melnik at 521-5310 or pmelnik@pressdemocrat.com.