Old wines demonstrate that Napa wines can age well

Paul Franson

Freemark Abbey in the early 1900s

Three venerable Napa Valley wineries recently held retrospectives going back 25 to 30 years, and it was a great time to check out how well Napa wines age.

A retrospective of whites and reds at Grgigh-Hills Estates

Few winemakers have had a more illustrious career than Miljenko “Mike” Grgich. The story of how he fled his home in then-Communist Yugoslavia, landed in Napa Valley and worked with legends André Tchelistcheff and Robert Mondavi before joining Chateau Montelena. There he made the Chardonnay that beat the best white Burgundies in the famed Paris Tasting of 1976, which changed the world’s perceptions of Napa wine.

Grich joined with vineyard owner and coffee heir Austin Hills to start Grgich Hills Cellars on July 4, 1977.

To celebrate the winery's 30th anniversary, they held a tasting of older – and new -- wines.

The tasting featured Grgich Hills Chardonnays dating back to 1986. That’s a gutsy move, for most Napa and California Chardonnays fade fast.

Grgich-Hills’ old Chardonnays remained vibrant, with the 1992 perhaps the best of the lot. Grgich attributes the ageability of the wines to traditional winemaking techniques, including picking when grapes are at the peak of ripeness but not overripe and avoiding malolactic fermentation for white wines.  

The Grgich-Hills Cabernets also showed well, with the 1985 peaking, though the younger wines are a bit softer to start with. I think most wine drinkers would prefer the 5-to 10-year old wines if no one showed them the labels.

Fads come and go, but the 84-year-old Grgich and his nephew Ivo Jeramaz still make wines as they once did, and the results speak for themselves.  

The winery has changed with time, however, and has adopted some modern techniques. Perhaps most significantly, returning to the past in many ways, Grgich Hills Estates, the name adopted since it now supplies all its own grapes,  owns 366 acres, all certified organic and farmed biodynamically.  

Retrospective of Petite Sirah at Stags’ Leap Winery

Stags’ Leap Winery makes Cabernet Sauvignon, the signature wine of Napa Valley, and especially the Stags Leap District. The distinctly separate Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars made the Cabernet that beat the best Bordeaux in 1976.

The winery may be best known, however, for its Petite Syrahs (their spelling). The grape was once the most widely planted varietal in Napa Valley, and reportedly added color (and tannin) to Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy and other popular wines of decades ago. It ripened when Cabernet wouldn’t back in those days before we learned as much about growing as we know now.

 The winery recently held a tasting going back to 1977. Again, the wines have held up amazingly well, and the 30-year old selection could have been only a few years old. Still Petite Sirah (the usual spelling) can be an inky monster and needs a little age, says 5 to 10 years, and is best with hearty food.  

Stags’ Leaps vineyards are not pure Petite Sirah, however. They’re planted in the old fashion with a dozen varieties including white  Burger and Muscat of Alexandria, but winemaker Kevin Morrisey says 75 percent are Petite Sirah.

“A mixed field blend is more interesting than pure Petite Sirah,” he says.

A retrospective of Freemark Abbey Cabernets

The third tasting was at venerable Freemark Abbey, which dates back to 1886, but entered its modern age in 1967 and was recently bought by Jess Jackson and Barbara Banke, who own Kendall-Jackson and a host of smaller boutique labels.

The winery was an early pioneer in identifying the specific vineyard source on labels. Its most famous source was Bosché Vineyard but also is known for the Sycamore Vineyard.

The oldest wine, the ’77 Bosché remained young tasting with brisk acidity and vibrant tannins even after all that time. It had a slight brick color indicating age, but was not old and tired.

To me, the old barrel flavor dominates this and the other old wines, which I don’t like, but some of my wine-writing colleagues love it.

All the older wines exhibited the cedar and tobacco aromas I remember from my early days drinking wine back to the ‘60’s, and some even had the subtle herbaceous character I used to associate with Cabernet.

Those flavors have largely disappeared in modern California wines, to be replaced by ripe black fruit and often chocolate flavors – and often a wallop of alcohol. The early wines were in the low 13 percent, even 12.8 percent, compared to today’s more-than-14.

Freemark Abbey’s wine making has changed, too, though it’s had the same winemaker, Ted Edwards, for 27 years. The wines made in the latter ‘90s and later are more “modern” but subdued and elegant, not over the top like many expensive Napa Cabernets that get very high scores from the leading critics.

In a nutshell, most of the older wines held up well, but they didn’t necessarily get better. Winemaking and especially grape growing have improved so much over that time that I find the newer wines generally better in every respect, especially for drinking now. I don’t choose to drink any Cabs unless they’re at least 5 years old, but don’t see much improvement in most of them past 10 or 15 years.

-- end --

 Return to NapaLife