A vineyard dying from phylloxera is hardly the ideal birthplace for a wine that might be California's best Cabernet Franc.
By W. Blake Gray | Posted Sunday, 06-Dec-2020
Some of the world's great wines come from lovingly managed vineyards. And some come from scraggly vines planted and managed haphazardly that survive long enough to get interesting.
Lang & Reed, the Napa Valley Cabernet Franc specialist, will release two unique extra-aged wines in December, and there's one of each type. There's a 2007 wine from a carefully tended vineyard in one of the coolest parts of Napa Valley. And there's a 2010 wine from a vineyard in Lake County that was dying of phylloxera.
They're both good, but I'm in love with the wine that was planted and farmed with less forethought: Lang & Reed Franc de Pied Lake County Cabernet Franc 2010. It's the best California Cabernet Franc I've ever had, and poor planning is part of the reason.
Not poor planning on the part of Lang & Reed founder/winemaker John Skupny, though. He has been the advocate for Cabernet Franc in Northern California for more than 20 years. There are so few other wineries taking Cabernet Franc seriously that it's worth stating what it tastes like when grown in the California sun (and not over-extracted or over-oaked.)
"It's very aromatic for a red grape," Skupny told Wine-Searcher. "There is a lot of perfume to it, which tends to be more foresty. The garrigue that everybody talks about in southern France is like that. The fruit tone is on the higher side: raspberries, strawberries. I think that's why people think Cabernet Franc is a high acid grape. It's actually not. But its fruit tone adds tartness to it."
In 2005, Skupny discovered a Lake County vineyard of Cabernet Franc planted 30 years before on its own roots (they call that "Franc de Pied" in the Loire) and quickly agreed with the vineyard owner, who he called "a cranky old coot", to buy the grapes.
For five vintages Skupny used it as a component in his North Coast Cabernet Franc. But each year the yield got smaller as phylloxera slowly sucked the life out of the vineyard, as happens to vines planted on their own roots. In the Loire, some wineries accept this as the cost of making a Franc de Pied, Skupny said; they plant a row, get a crop from it for about 12 years, and then replant. A 35-year-old own-rooted planting of Cabernet Franc in a phylloxera zone – well, that's just unheard of.
Hitting the jackpot
In 2010, Skupny got just over a ton an acre from the vines. The vineyard owner was angry at him over his refusal to pick from some dying vines that Skupny said didn't ripen their grapes. And Skupny said it wasn't worth hiring a crew to go up to Lake County for the small amount of fruit he was getting. So that was his last vintage buying the fruit; he says the farmer gave up the following year. He fermented and barreled it separately, as he does with all his Cabernet Franc lots, and by the next summer he realized he had something special.
"I thought, I could be losing something here because these were 35-year-old vines," Skupny told Wine-Searcher. "I didn't bottle it. I had two barrels of it. I waited until the next year and then I bottled it and we never knew what we were going to do with it."
Lang & Reed will finally release it this month. If you can afford a $125 wine, you should snap it up. The complexity is astonishing. The only thing I can compare it to is a Zinfandel made from 100-year-old vines. The flavors keep changing – now it's black fruit, now it's red. Is that pencil shavings? Violet? Raspberry? Sage? It seems fairly rich on the palate at first, but then it reveals a brambly fruitiness. The nose is so alluring that it keeps bringing you back. It's compelling.
The winery's other special December release is also an interesting story. Skupny bought an oak tree named Article No. 33 at an auction in 2005, while it was still growing in the Tronçais forest in France.
"My wife thought I was crazy," Skupny said. "Normally when I leave the house, my wife says: 'Don't buy anything'."
The tree was the lone survivor of a 1999 windstorm that knocked down all the trees around it. In December 2005 it was felled and the French cooper Nadalie gradually turned it into barrels, which were delivered to Lang & Reed in 2008, just as the winery was finishing blending its flagship wine. Naturally Skupny used one of the barrels for Lang & Reed Article No. 33 Napa Valley Cabernet Franc 2007, which he bottled in 2010, and which, like the Franc de Pied, he didn't know quite what to do with.
This 13-year-old wine is a Cabernet Franc for Cabernet Sauvignon fans. The dense dark fruit aroma with mocha notes (likely thanks to the tree) makes the wine seem like it's going to be formidable, but it's leavened by the inherent lightness of the variety. It's a steakhouse wine, and a good one.
Skupny feels fortunate to oversee the release of these wines because, when the pandemic started in March, "I was really panicking," he said. "I thought we were going to go out of business." Lang & Reed then sold 70 to 80 percent of their wines to restaurants and had no tasting room and almost no direct sales.
"We've been able to pivot a little bit," Skupny said. The winery has opened a tasting salon for appointments in downtown St Helena. It also worked with its distributors to try to get its wine into more retail stores.
It's a late-career shift for Skupny, 67, who started Lang & Reed in 1996 while working at Niebaum-Coppola after stints at Caymus and Clos du Val. His wife Tracey, one of the 3.5 employees at Lang & Reed, recently retired from her job as marketing director at Spottswoode.
Boy meets girl
Skupny's story of how his Cabernet Franc fate was decided is a great one. In 1977, he and Tracey were living in Kansas, where he was a wine buyer for the famous Eldridge Hotel. They were dating, but broke up and she went off to Champagne.
"I realized I was missing something so I went over there after her," Skupny said.
He won her heart back and they decided to get married with the help of one of her relatives in Zurich. But they needed to wait for a marriage license, so they decided to visit another wine region in the interim.
"I made a decision that affected my whole career," he said. The choice was between taking a train to Burgundy, which is fairly close to Zurich. Or, he realized, they could take a train to Tours in the Loire and transfer to an overnight train to Bordeaux. They were completely neutral on whether they wanted to visit Burgundy or Bordeaux – but the overnight train meant they could save one night's hotel room fee.
"Coming into Bordeaux, to actually physically be on the ground, to spend a day over in Saint-Émilion, it was incredible," Skupny said. "It was at a bar in Saint-Émilion where, for 15 Francs [old French currency; about $3], we could get a 15-year old Cheval Blanc. Tracey said: 'If you're ever going to make wine, you should make wine like this'."
By the 1980s they had moved to Napa Valley and he was working at Caymus for Chuck Wagner.
"Chuck didn't like Merlot," Skupny said. "He thought Cabenet Franc would add lift to the wine without adding too much tannin."
Skupny started paying more attention to the variety, but he was one of few who did.
"I sat on panels with Cabernet Sauvignon producers in the '80s and '90s," Skupny said. "They really badmouthed Cabernet Franc. I said, well, it's not really planted in the right places." He said Cabernet Sauvignon producers would plant Cabernet Franc in the worst part of their vineyards.
By 1993, inspired by Jason Pahlmeyer's success without owning a vineyard or winery building, and by his own success selling Cabernet Franc for Coppola, Skupny and Tracey decided to start a side business. They bought some Cabernet Franc and made five barrels.
"I was taking a page from Dan Duckhorn: find something you really love and be really good at it," Skupny said. "In 10 years people can ask, what's the best Merlot in Calfiornia? What's the best Cabernet Franc in California?"
Specializing has some disadvantages. The major ratings organizations are not fans of Cabernet Franc: "A 92-point Cabernet Franc is like a 98-point Cabernet Sauvignon," Skupny said. But there are also advantages. Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc has been a staple of by-the-glass lists for years. But then the pandemic hit.
Boy meets girl v2.0
Ironically, something helping the winery now is its other grape variety, which was also forsaken in northern California: Chenin Blanc. Chenin Blanc is trendy enough now that Skupny says three other Napa wineries have tried to poach his grape sources. But he was ahead of the curve, and the reason is a second-generation version of his Cabernet Franc origin story.
Skupny's son Reed had a girlfriend (now wife), Megan, who was from Atlanta and "didn't really understand the wine thing", he said. But they went to the Loire together for Reed to work a harvest at Bernard Baudry in Chinon.
"Sometime during that year they went to a festival in Vouvray [which is famous for Chenin Blanc]," Skupny said. "Reed writes me that night and says, 'I think I found Megan's muse. She just loves it'."
In 1980, Chenin Blanc was the second-most planted grape in California, after French Colombard. There was more Chenin Blanc than Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio, combined. In Napa County it was the fourth-most planted grape; there were 2255 acres of it, according to the USDA. Today there are just 19 acres of Chenin Blanc in Napa.
John and Reed wanted to make some for their winery, but it took four years to find a vineyard source: dry-farmed Norgard Vineyard in Mendocino County. It took longer to find his Napa source. He makes two Chenin Blancs and they're both excellent. The Mendocino one is friendlier and juicier, while the Napa, which gets more new oak, takes a while to open, but brightens up and has a long finish.
Surprisingly trendy Chenin Blanc now might serve as a door opener for his Cabernet Franc. He's making less wine – about 2000 cases a year total, after making 3000 cases a year for many years.
"We're dealing with two glass-ceiling varieties," Skupny said. "There's no Cabernet Franc section in retail stores. In retail, we have fewer clients, but they're buying more. We haven't sold enough, but we've shifted to 65 percent direct to consumer. The profitability has gone up."
And he finally found the time to release those unique Cabernet Francs that had been sitting around the warehouse for a decade. It's sad to think of the plants that aren't with us anymore: the own-rooted vines, the tree that survived a windstorm. But they have left us gifts.
December 06, 2020 at 03:08AM
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California's Other Cabernet Stakes a Claim - Wine-Searcher
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