Oakville Wine Growers

Posted 04/30/2008 at 01:17 AM by Dirk

The Oakville Wine Growers just had their annual Taste of Oakville tasting. I think it is as good a showcase of an appellation as can be found. Even though Oakville is tiny – about 2400 acres – it has remarkable variation in soils, drainage and exposure. The resulting wines reflect these differences. The vineyards and the wineries are among the most sought after producers of cabernet within Napa Valley. In short, Oakville = Cabernet. There is likely more information at the Oakville Winegrowers website.

There were sommeliers, restaurateurs, and members of the press attending. We crowded onto the upper floor of Robert Mondavi's cabernet tank room. It's the level where they crush their cab and let it fall by gravity into their traditional wood fermentation tanks. Personally, I am not a fan of oak tanks for fermentation but I love looking at them in other wineries. (The realities of yeast and bacterial problems in old oak along with improvements in the heating and cooling of stainless tanks, makes the argument for new tanks compelling when pursuing great wine.) They sure are beautiful.

I don't know how to advise you on getting a ticket to this tasting. I was lucky that they let me in. (Maybe it's this blog that is opening doors to tastings and restaurants?)  While the stampede to get to the Screaming Eagle didn't create too many injuries, it was a temporary diversion. (They only brought three bottles and it was soon gone.

The real education was trying and comparing the two main vintages that were there; 2004 and 2005. (I am more of a fan of 2005 even though it can seem a tad young.) and, in tasting and comparing the significant differences in flavors from the west side to the center to the east side of Oakville.

If you can't put together that sort of a tasting with various wineries, you can recreate what we were doing at the Nickel & Nickel table through the single-vineyard cabernets we grow in Oakville.

They were all from the 2005 vintage. Tench Vineyard is on the red rock soils beside the Silverado Trail on the east side. The center soils near the Napa river were on display in the John C. Sullenger Vineyard cab. Closer to the western soils is Rock Cairn Vineyard (across from Brix restaurant) and showing the western loam soils at the base of the hills was Branding Iron and Martin Stelling Vineyard. Those five wines give a quick overview of what was going on in regional variation as shown by over 40 wines at the Oakville Wine Growers tasting.

Part of the real fun for us was seeing our neighbors. We like growing grapes and making wine with them yet all of us seem to be too busy to get together as often as we would like. We have similar hopes for our wines and are often dealing with the same trials such as all of the recent frosty mornings. It is nice to have an excuse to shake hands, tell a couple of stories and enjoy tasting each others work.

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