Two hundred buck chuck
Wealthy wine collectors will empty their pockets for some of California's most sought-after cabernets. But are hype and clever marketing all that distinguish a $500 wine from a $25 one?
Editor's note: This is the latest entry in the Salon series "Eat & Drink."
By Stephen Yafa
Read more: Wine, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
Nov. 7, 2006 | When you find a wine you truly love under 20 bucks you should bow down and give thanks to the gods. Few of us who sip, gurgle and spit for a living -- wine writers, that is -- would disagree with that sage advice from poet-hunter-novelist-wine buff Jim Harrison. Harrison swoons when he finds a saucy inexpensive Bandol rosi that tastes "as soft and pleasant as the back of a girl's knee after a dip in the Mediterranean." If it spawns that kind of moist poetry, I'll take a case. Still, with a few notable exceptions, inexpensive quaffing wines rarely linger in memory. If you're looking for complexity and depth, for the bottomless pleasure offered by a darkly delicious glass of wine, the conventional wisdom goes, you'd better be prepared to lay out some serious green.
In search of unforgettable imbibing experiences, thousands of deep-pocket drinkers are pouring out small and large fortunes to purchase the cult cabernet sauvignons of Napa Valley, Calif., or the reigning French royals of Bordeaux and Burgundy. At $250 to $2,000 a bottle, these wines are made with far more vigilance, in smaller lots, with higher-priced grapes and oak than cheap wines, certainly -- but not necessarily all cheaper wines. There are now many domestic cabernets in the $50-$60 range produced with equal finesse, by winemakers equally fanatical in their approach, from premium hillside fruit that's been coddled, groomed and selected with the same manic zeal, and sorted and barreled with no less love, devotion or expense.
As a result, what these cult-crazed shoppers -- many of them well-heeled collectors -- are buying isn't rarefied wine so much as an object lesson in the fine art of marketing scarcity. It's simple economics: When there's not enough of something to go around, in tandem with a buzz fostered by word-of-mouth and critical acclaim, the intrinsic value of a product becomes less important than its perceived value. That marketing strategy has worked spectacularly well for Harlan Estate, Screaming Eagle and a small handful of other successful producers in Napa who have carefully limited their output in the face of enormous demand. Customers wait months to get onto waiting lists, for a chance to be allocated three or six bottles at most from the few hundred cases of wines each winery produces for their top labels. Acquisition itself becomes the object of desire.
In France, at the very least, money buys a pedigree. A Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Petrus or a Romanie-Conti enters your cellar trailing several hundred years' worth of dazzling medals, honors and tributes. The rare, coveted Grand Cru or Premier Cru classification, awarded in 1855, is a badge of official recognition that confers nobility as well as celebrity -- and celebrity today translates into mounds of cash. A pre-release 2005 Lafite currently fetches $600 a bottle; an '05 Petrus, $2,000 -- and these wines won't arrive on your doorstep for another two years, or start drinking well for another six or seven years after that. You may not savor their more austere, less fruit-forward style. Still, if you know wines even a little, your senses assure you these are not impostors to the throne. A few sniffs of their French barnyard bouquets tell you they stink in all the right ways.
But what to make of their American counterparts, the parvenus, the upstarts from Napa Valley? With no entrenched classification system to bolster their prestige, and no promise of success based on a lengthy history of high scores for past releases, many wannabe cult cab producers make up the rules as they go along. After actor Martin Sheen suffered a massive heart attack while filming "Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola screamed at his studio bosses, "Marty's not dead until I say he's dead!" By that same exotic logic, anointing your California wine a Premier Cru, or First Growth, should be enough to confirm its exalted status.
But does it? Consider Harlan Estate on the western border of Oakville in Napa, a celebrated producer of cult cabernet sauvignon, and Chalk Hill Estate, in the northeastern Alexander Valley area of Sonoma. A single bottle of 2001 Harlan Estate currently sells at auction for $400 at Sotheby's in New York, and for $698 at Wine Cask in San Francisco. A bottle of 2003 Chalk Hill cabernet, which won a 94 (out of 100) score from Wine Enthusiast, sells for $59.99.
Not that anyone at Harlan is trying to pull a fast one. Winemaker Bob Levy and general manager Don Weaver send crews out into their hillside vineyards with a single mission: search and destroy. In the trade it's called dropping fruit. To you and me it's pure Darwinism. They cut off any cluster of grapes that might produce inferior wine by virtue of being under-ripe, unevenly ripe, over-ripe, sunburned or somehow anemic. Only the fittest survive, less than half the clusters, and only the fittest of those highly flavored grapes go into the limited bottling of Harlan Estate cabernet. "We separate the sheep from the goats," says Weaver. The goats go into the cheap stuff, Harlan's second label, the Maiden -- which sells at about $100 a bottle.
All that effort, Weaver adds, is in the service of making wine that faithfully expresses the Harlan site as a distinct location producing a distinct flavor profile. When San Francisco real estate developer Bill Harlan purchased 240 acres of forested hillside in western Oakville in 1984 and carved out his vineyards, he had one goal in mind: to make cabernet that would rival Premier Cru Bordeaux. He cleared and planted, and waited 12 years before he was willing to market a wine with the polish and density he sought. Parker gave the first Harlan Estate 1996 release a 92 score, and told his readers to "mortgage the farm" for the 2002, at $300 a bottle. That vintage now retails between $745 and $910.
Weaver and Levy, along with winemakers at most other cult wineries, shower visitors with elaborate tales of their obsessive, meticulous care and handling of the grapes they grow and ferment. Legions of workers line their conveyor belts at harvest time for hours at a stretch, they are quick to report, picking off every speck of stem, leaf or any other debris that could attach itself to the fragile claret orbs.
Pampered, cosseted and groomed, the cabernet berries are hand-pruned and hand-sorted; they rest in micro-lot fermentation tanks -- bridal suites -- inside multimillion-dollar wineries, some with state-of-the-art air circulation systems, until they get ever-so-gently pressed and liquefied. Then they sleep in only the most costly fine-grained white French oak while being analyzed -- and often manipulated -- by teams of chemists, tasters and specialists whose singular mission is to bend nature to their whim to produce lush, ripe-fruit wines with low tannins and no sharp edges.
