The Wine's the Thing
Mitch Kornfeld
2/27

King Cab, Part I -- Some Basics

It's still winter and I'm still talking about red wines. This week I want to talk about the biggest and best red wine grape there is, Cabernet Sauvignon. Its name is obviously French, and most wine lovers know it hails from Bordeaux but do you know its parentage? The answer is both obvious and shocking at the same time. I'll tell you at the end. This is an old devious writer's trick to make you read the whole piece and it's not really necessary with a champion like Cabernet Sauvignon, but there it is nonetheless.

Cabernet Sauvignon is the Beethoven of wines. It's big, bombastic, and beautiful. It's a shy-bearing, noble grape variety, and its calling cards are wines of great depth, flavor, and complexity. Wine writers and reviewers wear out their thesauri in describing cabernet. The basic flavors are of deep berry fruit, and currant, with a peppery spiciness. Among the descriptive terms that are often seen are violets (crushed and uncrushed), pepperiness, black cherry, and chocolate. Frequent guests also include an array of herbal flavors. Mint and mintiness lead the way with sage and eucalyptus sometimes sneaking in. If the grapes weren't picked at full ripeness the terms you often see are dill and olive, and sometimes an unspecified "herbalness." If the grapes were really unripe you come across weedy and vegetal. Needless to say if you come across those last two you're looking at a wine to be avoided. If the wine was aged in oak, which is what usually happens with cabernet, the descriptors run to vanilla, cedar, tobacco, and cigar box.

As you can gather I'm talking about interesting and complex stuff. I guess one could hypothesize that the longer a review is and the more adjectives the reviewer uses, the more complex and interesting the wine is. This isn't written in stone to be sure, but there's nothing like a good cabernet to get the creative juices and the purple prose flowing. Sometimes the reviewers can really make you wonder. When you come across a review that talks about chocolate, cherry, and vanilla flavors, a neophyte could be excused if he thought he was reading about Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt instead of a big complex red wine. What they're saying is more about suggestions of flavors, about being reminded of flavors, about how the flavor of a wine is something like, say, chocolate, not tasting the same as literally biting into a bar of chocolate.

Cabernet Sauvignon is a tannic variety, which means it needs time to age, but it also means there's another area where the writers and reviewers get to unleash a hail of adjectives. The tannins get described with terms such as ripe, fine, superfine, integrated, well-integrated, plush, smooth, and velvety. The last two terms are downright oxymoronic because tannins are astringent by definition. What you come to understand, after reading these things for years, is that they are talking about relativity. "The tannins in this cabernet are velvety as these things go," is what they mean. With that said it is also true that one should avoid tannins that are rough, chewy, grainy, dusty, dusky, or rustic, unless the wine is balanced by gobs of, oodles of, tons of, or gushes with, sweet, deep, unabashed, ripe voluptuous, or up-front, fruit. You get the idea.

The writers and reviewers can get carried away but that's all right. I have found that it's not an easy task to take a sensation and put it into words. Quick, try describing the taste of chicken. Now try it without using comparisons to turkey and duck. (Notice I haven't mentioned Cabernet Franc and Merlot, the other two big red Bordeaux varieties?) See how difficult it is? If a reviewer is inspired by a wine it's a good sign. (And as I said cabernet inspires them as much as anything.) I like reading descriptions of wine. They give better information and are a better indicator of a wine's quality than a number is. Numbers are a useful convention. Newspaper ads would be completely unwieldy if descriptions only were required, but people discuss the wines they drink. No one has ever had a conversation that went like this:

"How do you like the wine dear?"
"I'm giving it a 93."
"I thought 92."
"Try it after a bite of the lamb."
(Pause) "You're right dear, a 93 it is."

Last week I brought a 1994 Gundlach-Bundschu Sonoma Valley Cabernet Franc to my favorite BYOB restaurant. My lady friend The Reluctant Connoisseur didn't have to ask how it went with my Vegetable Thai Curry because I did a Curly Howard slap myself in the face twelve times, along with sound effects, that answered the question. Much more descriptive than saying "87."

(For those of you with unlimited curiosity, if you really want to know, otherwise you could just skip this and get back to Cabernet Sauvignon, the Cabernet Franc-Thai Curry match was quite an experience. Weird really. I think the wine suffered from the grapes having had an overly long "hang time," and having developed too much flavor, which resulted in an odd menthol-like bouquet. It may have been one of those rare instances where a wine is better in an off or average year than in a really good one. I liked their '89, a wine from a certified "eh" year, and '94 was a certifiably excellent year. I would bet that the '98 is going to be just fine. The curry dish just brought out the menthol taste in spades. It was like having a really strong but not sweet menthol-eucalyptus cough drop, and it did make the elusive and sought-after "third flavor," something different from the tastes of the wine and the food individually, but it was a bit much. I figured a somewhat herbally tasting variety should do something with curry, and I was right in that guess, but I wouldn't want to be right like that very often.)

If you're reading a review for a Cabernet Sauvignon in a reputable publication and it says something like this: "A tasty young cabernet with cherry, currant, and minty flavors, wrapped around a core of fine tannins, turning lush and velvety in the long finish," and if this sounds good to you, if this sounds like your kind of wine, and if the price seems reasonable to you, buy the wine even if it isn't accompanied by a high numerical rating.

The taste of Cabernet Sauvignon is actually quite distinctive. It doesn't take long for a beginner to recognize the taste and it doesn't take long to start judging different wines according to how much taste they exhibit. To learn how cabernet tastes, for not too many bucks, try a Napa Ridge, Estancia, J.Lohr, or Fetzer, all from California. Any recent vintage will do. Or try Los Vascos, or the Casillero Del Diablo from Concha y Toro, both from Chile. Prefer a '97 or '99 to the '98.

The better Cabernet Sauvignons require aging and the rewards of aging are great. Cabernet is shy-bearing and the wines can have great concentration. If you have older vines in a favorable site (read favorable soil and climate), and the wine was aged in new (preferably French) oak barrels, you have what you need to pack a lot of flavor and a lot of stuffing into a bottle. The longer you age this flavor packed bottle (to a point that is, you don't want to age it into senility) the more velvety, nuanced, and complex the resulting wine will be. That's the real beauty of Cabernet Sauvignon. It's capable of aging into something of extraordinary complexity, to become something multi-layered and multi-dimensional, a wine that changes and evolves in your glass, before your very taste buds, as it slowly reveals all its lush and lovely facets.

In the coming weeks I'll be figuratively traveling around the world looking at places where we find the exotic but not uncommon Cabernet Sauvignon. As to its origins, Cabernet Sauvignon first appeared in Bordeaux in the 1600's and is a naturally occurring cross between Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. This makes sense linguistically, but it is shocking in that Cabernet Franc has nowhere the richness and strength of Cabernet Sauvignon, and Sauvignon Blanc is, well, a white grape! Talk about the sum being greater than its parts. When I first saw that I was doing quadruple takes. Then I read it somewhere else. That DNA just doesn't lie. I'm sure there are more surprises out there that modern viticultural (wine grape growing) science will reveal but I can't imagine anything more surprising than that.

© Mitch Kornfeld 2001 All rights reserved

Send your comments or questions to...
mitchk@unionsquarejournal.com

Previously by Mitch Kornfeld...

For a Big Red, Think Petite (02/18/02)

Tannic Monsters from the ID (02/08/01)

New York Wine and Restaurant Deals (01/30/01)

Dad's Cardinal Zins and Other Clichés (01/20/01)

Some Basics for a Winter's Eve (01/12/01)

And if They're Spanish That's Fine (01/05/01)

Hello Carbon Dioxide (12/29/00)

Wines for Christmas (12/22/00)

Nouveau Beaujolais, Etc. (11/24/00)

Going to a Tasting 101 (12/01/00)