Former Wine Spectator critic James Suckling, who’s been all over Facebook lately (Twitter, too; what’s up with that?), was tasting in Napa, and wrote that he wasn’t sure that 2007 is the “vintage of the century” for Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. That stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest on his FB page! Even I felt compelled to write in, and while I didn’t declare ‘07 the vintage of the century (we still have, what? 90 years to go) I did say it has yielded some pretty sensational Napa Cabs and Bordeaux blends. And that was before I reviewed this week’s top ten wines. The list is heavy on ‘07 Napa Cabs. Special shoutout to Rodney Strong for their ‘07 Symmetry Meritage, from “just over the hill” in good old Alexander Valley.

1. Vine Cliff 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville. 956 cases, 14.5%, $75

also Vine Cliff 2007 16 Rows Cabernet Sauvignon, $150 and Vine Cliff 2007 Pickett Road Vineyard Cabernet, $150

2. Paul Hobbs 2007 Stagecoach Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley (actually, Atlas Peak). 498 cases, 15.1%, $150

also Paul Hobbs 2007 Beckstoffer To Kalon Cabernet Sauvignon, $235

3. Hall 2007 Kathryn Hall Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley. 2,763 cases, 14.8%, $80

also Hall 2007 Ellie’s Cabernet Sauvignon, $55

4. Paul Hobbs 2008 Ulises Valdez Vineyard Chardonnay, Russian River Valley. 423 cases, 14.5%, $70

5. Gloria Ferrer 1999 Carneros Cuvée Sparkling Blend, Carneros. 2,000 cases, 12%, $50

6. Vine Cliff 2008 Proprietress Reserve Chardonnay, Carneros. 349 cases, 14.7%, $60

7. Brogan 2007 Buena Prierra Vineyard Helio Doro Block Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley. 220 cases, 13.5%, $90

also Brogan 2006 Michaela’s Reserve Pinot Noir, $110

8. Rodney Strong 2007 Symmetry Red Meritage, Alexander Valley. 5,583 cases, 15.1%, $55

9. Iron Horse 2005 Ultra Brut, Green Valley. 500 cases, 13.5%, $50

10. Knights Bridge 2008 West Block Chardonnay, Knights Valley. 200 cases, 14.5%, $65

More on the weird 2010 vintage: As I reported here, many vintners have been pulling leaves off from the canopies, in order to hasten ripening due to the cold summer and to let the clusters dry out from the overnight dampness. Then came this week’s heat wave, with temps approaching 110 degrees. You can guess what happened. All those naked grapes, under the broiling sun: raisins! That’s why they call it “farming.” Mother Nature always has the last word.

I’m still enjoying Secrets of the Sommeliers. There’s a section where Rajat Parr is talking about “the key to memorizing and comprehending wine styles from classic regions,” which is “to establish a single benchmark wine that represents a region or style.” Then, in analyzing any other wine of that variety or style, you compare it to that classic wine.

For example, here’s Rajat’s thinking process for understanding Bonnes Mares. “Does it taste like Pinot Noir?…Then, does it taste like Pinot Noir from Burgundy? Does it taste like Pinot Noir from the village of Chambolle-Musigny? And, finally, does it taste like Pinot Noir from the Chambolle-Musigny vineyard of Bonnes Mares?” If it does, “For me,” Rajat says, “that wine is Domaine Roumier Bonnes Mares.”

There are, to be sure, not all that many “classic” regions throughout the world where such an approach is possible. Rajat limits them to a top tier including Burgundy, the Loire, Champagne, Bordeaux and the Rhone; also, German Riesling (Mosel, Rheingau, Pflaz, Rheinhessen), Austrian Riesling and Gruner V., and Italian Piedmont, Tuscany and Veneto.  He makes allowances for Spanish Rioja, sherry and albarino, port and vinho verde and, from the New World, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, Aussie Shiraz, Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and Oregon Pinot Noir.

We can nitpick. I thought it would be interesting to take Rajat’s approach to “comprehending wine styles” and apply it to California. What are the classic grape varieties and wines, areas, producers and vineyards that represent “benchmarks” for the state? This is easy to do, in principle; hard, in fact, mainly because California’s history is so much shorter than France’s. Also, because in California, you can legally grow anything anywhere, as opposed (notoriously) in Old Europe.

Still, difficult as the task may be, it must be attempted, starting with Cabernet Sauvignon. I will concur with Rajat that Napa Valley remains the alpha and omega of Cabernet — so far. I consider Rajat’s Four Questions (does it taste like Cabernet? Does it taste like Cabernet from Napa Valley? Does it taste like Cabernet from the Stags Leap District of Napa Valley? Does it taste like the Hillside Select of Shafer?) and make my decison. Shafer Hillside Select: a California Cabernet Sauvignon that is a benchmark.

Pinot Noir. Rajat doesn’t consider California Pinot classic, although he does let Oregon into the club (which must make Paul Gregutt ecstatic). But that’s Rajat’s club. Mine is open to California Pinot Noir. Is there a wine that tastes like Pinot Noir? Does it taste like Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley? Does it taste like Pinot Noir from the warmer Middle Reach of the Russian River Valley? Does it taste like the Rochioli Riverblock Pinot Noir? Yes, four times. Williams Selyem Rochioli Riverblock Pinot Noir, a classic benchmark.

I’ll stop with Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, because there are other issues to sort out. Because you can legally plant anything you want anywhere in California, we can’t say (as they can in France) that the best Pinot Noir must taste like it comes from Burgundy (or the Cotes de Nuits, or Bonnes Mares). It’s in no one’s interests to set up beauty contests between the Middle Reach and Green Valley, or Philo, or the central Santa Lucia Highlands, or the Santa Rosa Road corridor of the Santa, err, Sta. Rita Hills, or the Arroyo Grande, or Carneros, or anyplace else. Ditto with Cabernet, which you can’t even limit to Napa Valley; and, even if you could, you would have to take into consideration the wide range of terroirs, ranging from Howell Mountain to the Rutherford Bench, from the flatlands of Georges III to the top of Atlas Peak, and so on.

Of course, Rajat could have taken the same approach to, say, Clos de Vougeot, Chambertin, Musigny, etc., as he did with Bonnes Mares, which would complicate and lengthen his process. But he would not have had to include Pinot Noir from anyplace else in France, which simplifies it; Rajat is limited to a relatively smallish growing area. It may be — I can certainly see the day coming — when we will have to begin including Cabernets (and Cabernet-dominated blends) from Paso Robles, Happy Canyon, parts of Sonoma County (of course) and possibly other areas, among the “classic benchmarks” of California; and, of course, we’re already there when it comes to Pinot Noir.

Another difficulty in California, as I earlier said, is its briefness of history. Take a wine like Evening Land’s Occidental Vineyard Pinot Noir. It is extraordinary, classic — but since they’ve only released a single vintage (2007), can it be a benchmark?

I don’t take precisely Rajat Parr’s approach to analyzing wine. But it is a useful, instructive one. What do you look for in judging a glass of wine? What benchmarks exist in your head? Whether or not you use a 100 point system, or puffs, or stars, or some other icon, or just a vague feeling in your mind, how do you calibrate wine quality?

Six thousand five hundred acres of prime Napa Valley real estate comprise the Rutherford AVA. Every year, the Rutherford Dust Society (f. 1994) holds an important tasting of the vintage, at Rubicon Estate, to which I try to go. This year’s event featured 23 Cabernets and proprietary blends from the heralded 2007 vintage.

It was good to see old, familiar faces: Peter Granoff (Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant), the great Gerald Asher, Andy Beckstoffer, whom I profiled in my New Classic Winemakers of California, Larry Stone, who’s been with Mr. Coppola for many years in senior positions, the great Joel Aiken, now on his own after many triumphant decades at Beaulieu, my friends Raul Gallyot and Jo Diaz and so many others.

What made 2007 such a great vintage? The weather. A coolish season, few heat spikes, a gorgeous harvest. “One of the most perfect summers I’ve ever seen,” said Larry Stone. “It was a lot of fun being here in 2007,” said uber-grower Beckstoffer. Peter Granoff spoke of the “shift back toward elegance, balance and finesse we’re seeing with this [2007] vintage.” I, myself, wrote that 2007 was the “Pinot Noir vintage of the century.” It was, across California, a very great year for just about everything, including Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

And what of Rutherford? It lies in the heart, the tenderloin of Napa Valley, just north of Oakville and south of St. Helena. It spans the benches and flatlands from the Mayacamas, across the Napa River, and then up into the rolling stretches of the Vaca Mountains, east of the Silverado Trail. You could argue that with such varied terrain and microclimates, Rutherford needs to be broken up. Clearly the Rutherford “Bench” (which includes the great Rubicon Vineyard, formerly Inglenook) is different from the Round Pond Estate and the hills of Hall, but it’s not my purpose to differentiate how, right now. Suffice it to say (paraphrasing an 18th century French abbot), “Il n’y a pas de vins communs” in Rutherford.

I’ll list my top-rated wines in a moment, but first I want to say that this tasting was a beauty contest and should be seen in that light. All of these are stunning, lovely wines. Some are a little more tannic than others, some are more accessible. Some show red cherry fruit, while others show black cherries and blackberries. Some are oakier, some more acidic, some more pronounced in tannins. But all, as Peter Granoff observed, display a breed and elegance that few other places in California are capable of. To have this many great Cabernet Sauvignons hail from one relatively small appellation is no small feat. (By the way, all wines were tasted blind.)

My highest-rated wine was the great Staglin 2007 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon.

My second highest-scoring wine was Long Meadow Ranch’s 2007 Cabernet. It was easily the best Cab from LMR I’ve ever reviewed, and that must surely be due to the vintage and winemaker Ashley Heisey’s (previously with Far Niente) increasing grip.

Other highly-scoring wines were Peju’s Reserve Cabernet, Monticello Tietjen, Round Pond Cabernet, Honig Campbell Vineyard Cabernet, Meander’s Morisoli Vineyard Cabernet, Beaulieu’s Georges de Latour, and Rubicon. (My full reviews and scores will appear in upcoming issues of Wine Enthusiast.)

Almost all of the wines are cellar-worthy, some for many, many years. This was a very impressive tasting and I was glad to be there.

Although California winemakers had been making so-called “Bordeaux blends” for years — Inglenook and Martini pioneered mixing Merlot or Cabernet Franc in with Cabernet Sauvignon, and Joseph Phelps’ Insignia was a blend from its first vintage, in 1974 — it wasn’t until 1988 that a group of Napa Valley vintners decided the blends needed a collective identity.

The founding wineries included Lyeth, Flora Springs, Franciscan and Dry Creek Vineyard. “Back then, you’d see a wine labeled ‘red’ or ‘table wine,’ and since consumers weren’t very knowledgeable, they assumed it would be inferior. We needed a categorization that felt right,” Kim Stare Wallace, Dry Creek Vineyard’s second-generation owner, said.

The wineries launched a nationwide competition to come up with a name; the winner would get a case of wine from each member winery, on an annual basis, for the rest of his or her life. I entered that contest, but did not win. Instead, a young man who was the wine buyer for an East Bay supermarket won by coming up with the term “Meritage,” and the wineries eventually formed themselves into the Meritage Association.

The Association has always had marketing issues, always struggled to make “Meritage” a universally-accepted term in the on-premise, off-premise, critical and consumer communities. Some of the original member wineries have since quit the Association; some important wineries that make Bordeaux blends never joined; and although the 250 members today are scattered across six countries, including Israel and Mexico, most of them remain located in California.

The Association’s president is Kim Stare Wallace. Its treasurer is Bill Smart, a likeable young guy who is Dry Creek’s communications director. I ran into Bill at the Wine Bloggers Conference last week, where he reminded me that the Association is engaged in a renewed P.R. push to increase its visibility. Here’s a brief Q&A:

Steve: Why do you need a special word for Bordeaux blends? Why not just educate the public about blending in general, and that any wine with less than 75% of the varietal can’t be named after a grape?

Bill: Well, it’s a valid point if you’re saying “Meritage is a dead term, so why have it?” But the reason there’s no credibility there is because we haven’t been consistent with marketing and messaging. Why is Rhone Rangers and ZAP what they are? Because they do a really good job of promoting. And we feel this category is worth promoting.

How are you promoting Meritage?

In 2011, our dream is to have the first ever consumer tasting of Meritage. It will be in San Francisco. We’ll partner with Wine 2.0, and it will benefit the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Our hope is to get 50 wineries pouring.

Why wouldn’t they all come?

Well, there’s an extreme amount of apathy, because most members have less than 250 cases [of Meritage], so it’s not a focus. They focus on their 5,000 cases of Sauvignon Blanc [or whatever] they have to sell.

How come so many wineries that make Bordeaux blends won’t join the Meritage Association?

You know, it’s the old explanation, “I have a proprietary red wine and I don’t need ‘Meritage’ to promote it. I already have enough credibility, so I don’t need you.” I always reply, “Well, you can throw ‘Meritage’ on the back of your wine label. It’s not that big a deal.”

[This is Steve again, opining.] I have mixed feelings about “Meritage” and its usefulness or lack thereof. I am, of course, entirely in favor of Bordeaux blends, red and white, if that’s what a winemaker wants to do. And I do understand that some education has to be given to consumers, who might expect to see a varietal name on every bottle of wine. The object, I think, is to explain that Bordeaux itself — which everybody’s heard of — is never a varietal wine, but always a combination of certain varietals. You could tell people, “This is a blend using the noble Bordeaux varieties,” and I suspect they’d be impressed. So why saddle consumers with yet another complicated word to remember and understand, when they’re already overwhelmed with wine minutiae?

On the other hand (there’s the Gemini in me), it does seem reasonable to make the case that these Bordeaux blends should be independently categorized. A categorization is always a justification for existence; the justification, in this case, is that a winemaker might be tempted to make a varietally-labeled Cabernet Sauvignon (i.e., containing at least 75% of that grape) merely in order to put Cabernet Sauvignon on the label, and not necessarily because it makes the best, most rewarding and complete wine. Meritage adherents thus are in a position to argue that they have freed themselves from the addiction to varietal labels. That’s a simple message to deliver, and one the public would understand.

It is so difficult to answer this question, despite the temptations of doing so, precisely because, as H. Warner Allen wrote, in his 1932 classic, The Romance of Wine: “Great wines are possessed of an individual personality, an originality of character, which varies, not merely from one district, vineyard or vintage year to another, but also from one bottle to another bottle of the same wine.” Another way of phrasing this is to say that there are no great vintages, only great bottles (and a free subscription to this blog to whomever comes up with the person who first said that).

For Cabernet in California, let’s first consider district. The grape needs moderate to full warmth to ripen. Plant it too close to the coast, and the thick-skinned grapes will never mature. The resulting wine will have a green character, of the sort that used to be called the Monterey veggies. On the other hand, if you plant Cabernet in too warm an area — the Central Valley, say — the grapes will lack sufficient acidity, and also the bunches will likely contain some raisined fruit, which will give the wine a pruny taste.

So you need something in the middle. Look at this map of California’s wine districts

and draw a diagonal line, running northwest to southeast, starting from Lake County and parallel to the coast. You’ll see how it goes through Napa Valley, then hits a little piece of Solano County and slices through Livermore Valley. Then it runs through a couple of counties that are not colored or named on the map; they are, respectively, Santa Clara and San Benito. After that, the line crosses the southeastern tip of Monterey County, crosses the eastern part of San Luis Obispo County, and trails off in the far eastern part of Santa Barbara County, where the coast turns inland in the Transverse Range.

That is California’s Cabernet line. All things being equal, that’s where the great Cabs grow.

Not all things are equal, though. The reason Napa Valley makes the best Cabernet Sauvignon is because things got started a lot earlier there, and a lot more money flowed in. What about Sonoma County? You’ll notice it lies west of the Cabernet line, making it, in general, too cool for Cabernet, although the Alexander Valley, and especially the western ridges of the Mayacamas Mountains, can be fine. The problem with Lake County is twofold: it got started a lot later (not really until the 1990s), and, being more landlocked and further from any coastal influence at all, Lake may prove ultimately to be too hot for Cabernet. We’ll have to see. As for that little piece of Solano County, it has its own AVA, Suisun Valley. There’s no reason Suisun shouldn’t be making good Cabernet, since its climate isn’t that different from Napa’s. Maybe some day, it will.

Livermore should be making better Cabernet. It has a long history; the reasons why it’s not probably have more to do with political, cultural and economic factors than terroir. Then we come to Santa Clara. You might not know it, but this county used to have the reputation for making the finest Cabernet Sauvignon in California — before it turned into Silicon Valley and subdivisions. (And by the way, most of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA is not in Santa Cruz County!) San Benito probably could make good Cabernet somewhere, but nobody I know of is trying. In the southern part of Monterey County, the Hames Valley and San Lucas AVAs are trying to grow better Cabernet, but once again, the amount of money a Monterey Cabernet can bring is not high enough for growers and vintners to invest a lot into the wine; and one of the things that makes a great Cabernet (or a great anything) is investment.

Then we come to San Luis Obispo. I’ve heard that people in the eastern, warmer part of the county are trying to grow good Cabernet, but none of it has crossed my desk so far. Finally, the Cabernet line crosses that eastern part of Santa Barbara County, the region that just got its own AVA, Happy Canyon. I’ve blogged about it before. The people promoting it are making a huge deal about its Cabernet potential, and I will admit I’ve had a couple of really good Cabernets from down there. They’re not as rich as Napa, more like a Graves, with a certain blackcurrant, mineral and herb essence. As a critic, I’m perfectly happy to let Happy Canyon prove itself (and believe me, there’s lots of money there).

When you consider all the above, you realize that California still is a young winegrowing place. They’ve had a thousand years, or whatever, in Bordeaux to figure it out. In most of the areas where, theoretically, Cabernet could thrive in California, we’ve had a few decades, and even in Napa Valley, just 150 years, more or less, which is a drop in the historical bucket.

Well, I said we’d start with district in determining what makes great Cabernet Sauvignon. And that discussion has eaten up this whole post. I’ll have more to say about other Cabernet factors in the future.