California contrarians

Two maverick winemakers buck the Napa Valley trend

NAPA VALLEY, Calif. - Fans of the 2004 sleeper hit "Sideways" thirsty for more wine on film can look forward to the August release of "Bottle Shock," a movie based on the landmark 1976 Paris blind tasting in which experts couldn't distinguish elite French chardonnay and cabernet from their upstart California cousins.

Although the method used to arrive at the results seems a little dubious in retrospect, the event that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris not only showed that a handful of American wines could stand with some of Europe's best, it marked the beginning of Napa Valley's fateful transformation from sleepy agricultural backwater to American Camelot. Complete with faux chateaux.

Even casual filmgoers are likely to know Napa's reputation for producing some of the world's most sought-after and expensive cabernets and Bordeaux-style blends. What they may not know is that big-time Napa wine has long ceased to be what it was in 1976, having incrementally morphed - not unlike the valley itself - into a flamboyant caricature of its former self.

Outrageously rich in fruit and alcohol, distinctly low in the acidity and tannins that confer structure and age-ability, wines that now fetch Napa's highest prices are pre cisely those farthest removed in style from those that bore away the laurels in Paris. At 32 years' distance, it seems worthwhile asking whether the spirit of '76 lives on here, and if so, where. Put the question to longtime Napa watchers here in the Boston area and you'll hear two names mentioned repeatedly: Michael Havens of Havens Wine Cellars and Chris Howell of Cain Vineyard & Winery. No young Turks, each is an established winemaker who has built a successful career making wine bucking the decades-long trend.

The burly 57-year-old Havens has had his own Napa label since 1985. At Havens winery the focus is on merlot and the goal is to make "something that's more than just sweet fruit and sweet oak" - the profile Havens says "rules the world." To achieve it, he sources some of his best fruit in Carneros, the southernmost end of the valley that acts as a funnel for cool North Pacific air currents. Havens prizes the soil and mineral flavors he's able to generate under these conditions. Use of oak is restrained. "We use it to give breadth and structure," he says. "Its presence should never be obvious."

Havens's attachment to classically balanced wine stems from his student days in Europe, where he absorbed the idea that fine wines were made to be enjoyed at the table, rather than stand out in a blind tasting. It's a fundamental notion that seems to inform every decision made here.

Sixteen miles north - and more than 2,000 feet above - Havens's Route 29 estate, Cain Vineyard & Winery perches aerie-like atop Spring Mountain. Chris Howell, 56, has been making wine amid stunning vistas here since 1991. His Cain Cuvee, Cain Concept, and flagship label Cain Five are each a variation on the classic Bordeaux blend, employing some combination of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, malbec, and petit verdot.

An American, Howell studied winemaking at the enology school in Montpellier in the French south, and it's clear that his outlook, too, was framed by the experience. Still, it would be wrong to say his goal is to make Old World wine on a New World mountaintop. Such a thing, Howell says, is not just inappropriate - it's impossible. "Greeks brought winemaking to Italy and Italians brought it to France and Germany. Your reference point is always going to be where you came from, but you can't just take a topographical map of the old place and lay it over the new place. It doesn't work that way."

If there's a single guiding principal at Cain, it is that making an elegant and shapely red wine means practicing no more than a partial extraction of the grape. The idea that skillful winemaking consists precisely in not wringing every last drop from every grape can fall strangely on ears used to hearing wines praised as "hugely extracted" . . . "massive" . . . "showing gobs of fruit" as one often does here. "You have to learn that it's OK to leave something behind," says Howell.

It's not by accident that Cain wines exhibit a vibrancy and agility rarely encountered in these parts. Still, Howell confesses "no one is really saying they want to make wine the way we do at Cain." Why is that?

Paris 1976 may have established California's bona fides as a source of fine wine, but the two most powerful drivers of Napa Valley's reputation since then - particularly that of its top-tier properties - have been Wine Spectator magazine and Robert M. Parker Jr.'s newsletter, The Wine Advocate. Each rates dizzying numbers of wines a year using a 100-point scale and consistently awards powerful, more heavily extracted and fruit-driven candidates top scores. It was only a matter of time before winemakers started consciously bending their wines to please these publications since, it is often said, wine that doesn't earn at least 90 points from one will be impossible to sell; while wine that does will be impossible to buy (because it will sell so fast).

It's difficult to pinpoint the moment when Napa winemaking jumped the tracks, but Dan Berger, longtime observer of the West Coast wine scene, points to the early 1990s as the moment when the trend toward what he has called "dull, pancake-flat red wine" seemed to take hold. "Since about 1994," Berger writes in "Wines & Vines," "this trend toward hugeness and softness has been a key ingredient in cabernet from 'top' producers." These are wines, he says, aimed squarely at scoring points.

Over the years, Havens's merlots and Bordeaux-blends have earned respectable but unremarkable 88-91 scores from Parker and nothing-to-write-home-about ratings of 86-88 from the Spectator. Parker typically grants Cain scores in the high 80s, conceding the occasional 90 or 91 in exceptionally ripe years; the Spectator giving up a few points fewer, on average. In this light, Howell's observation about having no following among young winemakers makes sense. Only those with a dissident streak of their own would follow his lead. They don't seem to be breeding that kind out here.

Boston-based Master of Wine Sandy Block thinks this is because the corporations that now own so many Napa properties are inherently conservative and will do everything they can to maintain the status quo (Havens Wine Cellars was itself recently sold to Billington Wines). "They have no incentive to innovate," Block says. His conclusion: Exciting things may be happening in California, but you have to look somewhere other than Napa to find them.

Our contrarians, meanwhile, appear underwhelmed by the attention they're not receiving at the hands of the critics who matter. While Havens graciously admits respect for Parker's skills and integrity, he's convinced that a sudden flow of scores in the mid-90s from The Wine Advocate, were they ever to come, could mean only one thing: "That I'd started doing something wrong."

Stephen Meuse can be reached at onwine@comcast.net.