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WINE & SPIRITS
backbreak mountain
I
’ ’ , ’ a steep and dusty hillside holding a knife in my right hand. Four rickety spotlights shine down from a humming tractor, casting a weird otherworldly glow into the thick darkness. It feels like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except that truth is stranger than science fiction. I’m here not to track down aliens, but to night-harvest grapes in one of the most fabled hillside Cabernet Sauvignon vineyards in the Stags Leap District of Napa Valley. “You should have come to pick Syrah—it’s much easier,” said Shafer Vineyards operations director David Ilsley the previous afternoon as he showed me how to carefully wield the small, sickle-like knife used to cut grape clusters from the vine. Five minutes into picking the next morning, I’m starting to wonder if I should have listened to him. Despite the near freezing temperatures, I’m already drenched in sweat. “Did you cut into an irrigation line?” vineyard manager Alfonso Zamora-Ortiz calls over to me, laughing. Not only am I dripping wet, but I am also embarrassingly slow. In the time it takes me to clear my first vine, the other 18 men have finished an entire row and disappeared down the mountain along with the tractor and the lights. I am alone in the dark and start to panic. That’s when one of the pickers, Uriel Osorio, takes pity on me. He grabs my basket and motions for me to follow him. We shimmy in the dirt underneath the trellising down to the next row, where the crews continue to work silently beneath the lights, weaving back and forth between the vines while carrying their 40-pound baskets filled with Cabernet clusters. Picking grapes is backbreaking work, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon, with
its small berry clusters and large leaves hiding the fruit from plain view. And then there’s that steep and rocky terrain. For the next few hours I shadow Uriel, methodically working from the left cordon of the vine to the right, filling a basket that he periodically empties into a larger bin. In just under four hours, as the first sliver of sun creeps up behind the mountain, our crew finishes picking 11.75 tons from Sunspot, a steep sevenacre vineyard named for a Utah ski run. I’m ready to drop dead. They’re heading to pick another vineyard. Having grown up nearby on Howell Mountain, I’ve seen countless harvests over the past few decades, worked in wineries, and written about the stuff for most of my professional life. And while I’ve tasted many beautiful wines that demonstrate why Napa Valley Cabernets are still the ones to beat, I’d never fully appreciated what goes into a glass of P. 59 ILLUSTRATIONS BY BELLE MELLOR
CN D IGITAL ST UD IO. FO R M ORE DETAI LS, SEE SO UR CEBO O K.
When a wine writer gets up from behind the keyboard and works a Napa Valley vineyard, she learns that great grapes, soil, and toil go into every bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon BY HEATHER JOHN
California’s most iconic wine until I california cabs worth catching stood on that mountain in the middle EIGHT ELEGANT HILLSIDE WINES, FROM $22 TO $225 of the night. (Picking at night ensures lower sugars and stabilizes the fruit when it goes into the tanks.) There’s an old winemaking cliché that the best wines come from vineyards with views, and indeed Napa’s most notable cult Cabernet Sauvignons— Bryant, Grace, Dunn, Colgin, Harlan, Shafer, and Dalla Valle—prove this true. Of course, there are plenty of spectacular wines from the valley floor as well. But there is something about those hills that reminds me of another Waterstone Smith-Madrone Ladera 2006 Kathryn Hall 2006, $22 An 2004, $45 Black Howell Mountain, 2006 Cabernet, proverb: Anything in life that’s worth exceptional value cherry flavors with $70 Blackberry and $75 Smoky and having is worth working for. for a hillside herbal notes and cherry flavors with earthy notes with And hillside Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet that’s aromas of cedar cocoa and spice. luscious blackberry balanced with ripe and violets. and herbal flavors. my friends, is work. “Why would plum, herbal, and anybody be up in the hills? You work cedar notes. much harder for much less fruit,” says Christopher Howell, winemaker for Cain Vineyard and Winery on Spring Mountain. Yields from hillside vines are often less than half that of their valley floor counterparts, and the cost of farming the hills runs up to four times as much. In addition to the physical challenges of farming on a steep slope, the volcanic soil found on the hills is poor and the vines have to work much Dunn 2007 Nickel & Nickel Shafer 2006 Vineyard 29 harder to produce—but it turns out Howell Mountain, 2007 Vogt Hillside Select, 2007 “29 Estate” that’s a good thing. “It’s partly because $85 A cult favorite Vineyard, $90 $215 Layers of Cabernet of gravity and the shallow soils—all the that is built to age Gorgeous dark ripe plum, black Sauvignon, $225 with rich black fruit flavors with cherry, and Black pepper and water drains downhill and naturally currant flavors and notes of tea and chocolate with spice mingle with creates stress for the vine, which powerful tannins. subtle oak. velvety tannins. dark cherries and a hint of chocolate. struggles to make leaves and ripen fruit,” says Shafer winemaker Elias Fernandez. “That results in smaller berries with more intense flavors, as well as thicker skins that produce more elegant, powerful wines with lush tannins.” valley. As my hands start to throb and my back aches while Or what Howell describes as “the perfume of a hillside wine. I struggle with a stubborn cluster of Cabernet, I remember It’s fresh and foresty, and not so much cherry pie.” hearing that when he wasn’t picking grapes, Uriel took great “In Europe, they grow vegetables down in the valley and pride in tending the grounds at Shafer and had mowed the premium grapes up in the hills,” says Randy Dunn, whose shape of a heart in the lawn that leads up to the winery. To 35-acre Cabernet Vineyard produces some of the most break the silence, I ask him why he made the heart, and he sought-after wines in the region. Dunn says he initially answers quietly that he doesn’t know, and continues working— decided on Howell Mountain in 1978 because he thought it his hands and knife a blur. Sometime later, as we near the was pretty. He soon discovered that the elevated climate and end of a row and the sun starts to rise, Uriel stops and says, “I the soils were essential to the wine’s unique character. “We mowed the heart because of my daughter. She’s three. When are in a different spot climatically, and that is the main key she came to visit here she pointed to where we are standing to these wines,” he points out. and said, ‘El corazon.’ The heart.” Which brings us back to the vineyard itself—a living, breathing entity creating something marvelous out of these Contributing editor Heather John writes regularly for the magazine. She also rocky volcanic soils, the wines that are the very heart of this blogs at thefoodinista.com. F E B R U A R Y 2 0 11 / B O N A P P E T I T. C O M
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