It's a Palooza, a CabFrancaPalooza!

Celebrating the brilliance of Cabernet Franc

I love wine. I love having my eyes and palate opened up to new varieties, new regions, new ways of expressing the ineffable it-ness of a grape. I consume a fair amount of wine but am consumed by only one grape - Cabernet Franc. There are impressive examples of practically every wine grape grown. No matter how great the Barolo or Clos de Vougeot, Montebello or Montrachet, none of them has the glorious combination of coquettish nihilism, pervasive sexiness, and aromatic profundity of Cabernet Franc. Cab Franc is a grape that struts at the margins - of too much acidity, too much green, too much exuberance. Because of its refreshing lack of moral superiority, its inherent “I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ness,” Cab Franc can be a polarizing grape. When pretzeled out of shape, Cabernet Sauvignon can still resemble Cabernet Sauvignon (though not a grand one); tarted up with 100% new oak, Pinot Noir can still reasonably claim its priggish sophistication. Though a genetic parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc is at its best when it refuses the raiments of wood and bigness, and celebrates its naked ferality.

Cabernet Franc finds its spiritual home in the Loire Valley; Chinon, Bourgeuil, and Samur-Champigny are also where this grape currently reaches its apotheosis. These wines, which date back to the 1600s, eschew new oak - barrel altogether in many cases - in favor of purity and authentic varietal character. At their best, the wines of the Loire are breathtaking, sexy as hell, and bottomlessly delicious.

Our L’Autre Côte by the Steven Kent Winery offerings are not only homages to the Loire Valley sensibility but also to our unabashed love of wines that have a point of view and a defining opinion about the proper way to make them. Too many examples of Cab Franc from the Napa Valley express fear instead of confidence. These wines lean on the successful (critically, at least) recipe of over-extraction + overripeness + too-much-wood = a wine that is all jammy fruit, softness, and without any necessary herbal signature. They bear no resemblance to real Cab Franc.

You turn a good man against himself and make him do something outside his essential nature, that brings out the darkness inside, and that good man has gone away. You crush the very thing that makes Cab Franc holistically great when you choose the dark side of winemaking. And, yes…this is a moral choice.

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You crush the very thing that makes Cab Franc holistically great when you choose the dark side of winemaking. And, yes…this is a moral choice.

Cabernet Franc - Palooza-worthy

In 1991 Perry Farrell, the frontman for the band, Jane’s Addiction, created a traveling circus of a music festival that he called Lollapalooza. Jane’s Addiction was nearing the end of its first run, and Farrell wanted to go out in a memorably grand fashion. Lollapalooza entered the lexicon in the late 19th century and named something that was “extraordinarily impressive.” In a neat stroke, the name of the concert tour became immanent in the zeitgeist it created.

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Because of its refreshing lack of moral superiority, its inherent “I-don’t-give-a-fuck-ness,” Cab Franc can be a polarizing grape.

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By the time this is posted, we will have thrown our first CabFrancaPalooza at our winery in the Livermore Valley. We will have poured some older vintages, shown off new releases from our favorite vineyards in Livermore and new ones from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and we will have celebrated the glory that is Cabernet Franc. We intend this first party to be just the start of a much larger celebration that brings Cab Franc from all over the world to the East Bay and exposes a growing audience to a variety that demands and deserves a stage all to herself.