Wine critic and flamboyant wine-marketer James Suckling boasts that he and his tiny team taste 25,000 wines a year.
That’s 68 bottles a day, day after day, even on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That’s also asinine.
In his wine-tasting hey-day, Robert Parker annually came to Napa Valley to assess a new vintage; he’d taste through 450 palate-bruising, purple-teeth-staining, Napa Valley Cabernets in three days. That’s 150 bottles a day!
No one, not even Bob Parker, can taste that many corrosive wines in a day and really assess their beauty, finesse and perfections.
The only wines that stand out when you taste this many at once are the over-alcoholic, over-extracted, over-oaked, aberrant wines. And when these hyper-exaggerated wines stand out from a pack tasted all together, these are the wines given a score of 100, simply because they poke their head out of a field of more nuanced wines. It’s the oddball wines that get the high scores and resultant press.
In my world, my end-of-year wine notes are assembled over 365 days, one wine at a time. With dinner.
In this manner, my few favorites this year were discovered one by one, WITH FOOD, which is what wine is all about and what it is intended to complement. All those wines tasted by critics Parker, Galloni and Suckling are rated with hundreds of other wines at the same time without food.
I kind of like the way I do things, and how I rate my wines.
“Okay the suspense is killing me, what are your favorite wines this year, Napaman?”
As has become my tradition, toward the end of the year, I roll the calendar backwards, reviewing the best wines that I have had the past year. So let’s get to it.
There were not many positive things you can say about COVID-19, but the resulting quarantine sent many of us deep into our cellars to discover long-lost wines hiding in corners.
In June, we had a most rare experience on our then 117th day of quarantine – three perfect, 100-point wines. How rare is that?!
The occasion was a visit from San Francisco of very close friends with whom we maintained proper social distance.
On the occasion of their visit, I called G&G (Goose & Gander), in St. Helena, home of the BEST BURGER IN NAPA VALLEY and asked chef Nic to supply me with two dozen of his insanely delicious burgers, frozen.
I figured that the Best Burger in Napa Valley required the Best Cabernets in Napa Valley, so I pulled out three different labels from three different vintages, hoping they’d be showstoppers.
Each turned out to be, respectively, a perfect, textbook, 100-point, wine.
2001 Rudd Cabernet, Oakville
The Rudd Oakville Cab, despite being 19-years-old, was still extremely youthful, filled with vigor and bright fruit. I raised a glass and toasted to the memory of Lesley Rudd, a friend who died a few years ago. He was the brains and brawn behind this wine. You can’t make a more perfect, more balanced, more nuanced, more satisfying wine. Loads of dark, ripe fruit, and a velour-like texture.
100 points.
2011 Kathryn Hall, Cabernet, red label
A comment about the 2011 Napa Valley vintage; James Laube of the Wine Spectator, and other wine writers, killed this vintage at the start, claiming that 2011 was a wet, less-than-stellar vintage, in essence, a major disappointment.
I begged to differ then – and still do -- and wrote numerous contrarian pieces at the time, forecasting that 2011 was going to be a supremely gratifying vintage. I predicted that the better wines would have balance, be less alcoholic, show finesse and elegance after six to nine years.
Let me count… 2020 minus 2011…. equals 9 years. Just as I predicted!
This is why the 2011 Kathryn Hall is showing so well right now – what a gorgeous wine! Filled with balance, elegance, and all those other “ance” words – like nuance, vibrance, endurance.
I have had numerous bottles of this red label Kathryn Hall wine from 2011 and each has flirted with 99-100 points. This bottle was particularly good, the wine so pleasing, so complementary to our barbecued G&G burgers that the union seemed to have the blessing of a higher order.
100 points.
2002 Harris Estate Vineyards, Treva’s Vineyard
The 2002 Harris Cabernet was a real treat, my sole remaining bottle and one I had completely forgotten I had in the cellar.
Mike and Treva Harris were close friends while they lived in Napa Valley; from their vineyard in Calistoga, they produced some exceptionally brilliant wines (several years ago, they sold their vineyards and gorgeous home and moved to Park City, Utah).
I wrote many times about their sensational wines, which were made by a succession of different winemakers, but the fruit was so good from their vineyards that even a neophyte winemaker couldn’t screw things up.
These were fantastic, magical, Cabernets. I had forgotten how good the Treva’s Vineyard offering was – this 2002 was filled with super-ripe dark fruit, exhibits a finish of ripe boysenberries. How delicious and what a complement to the G&G burgers!
100 points.
Oh, and let’s not forget those burgers – easily 100 points themselves!
Andy Florsheim, proprietor of G&G, has just temporarily closed the restaurant in St. Helena but says that he will reopen for outdoor dining at the very least in the spring, likely around late March.
Andy, don’t forget to let me know when you re-open… I will be down a few quarts of G&G burgers and several gallons of your sensational Manhattans by then!
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