Real Cabernet Franc
An Excerpt from Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine
Here is Chapter 6 from my first book:
Chapter 6: Real Cabernet Franc
I remember the first time I tasted real Cabernet Franc. I had just finished Kermit Lynch’s great wine book describing how he built his business, and I was compelled to taste the wines he had discovered in his travels. I bought some of the ’09 and 2010 vintage of what he had and knew that I had found a vinous signpost for myself. The wines of Joguet and the Bretons, eminent producers from the Loire Valley, flaunted their austerity and shoved their acidity right up in your face, fruit parading like a hooker in the old Times Square. These producers made a number of different wines; all had these things in common: they were 100% Cabernet Franc, they had an undeniable energy and sexiness, and they were flat-out delicious. Like the best of wines, these bottles created an emotional connection with me that continues to thrill.
I don’t know the producers personally, and don’t know that I will ever meet them, but I imagine them to be kindred. If we sat down over a bottle of wine in a restaurant in Livermore or Paris, we would be talking about how we express the fruit we have most authentically, what it means to devote oneself to a specific variety, how that quest impacts the business we are trying to transact and if that quest leads to some kind of balanced life. I would lean on them for their expertise in this great and grand variety, so much more expressive than its child, Cabernet Sauvignon, and though I may half-heartedly argue that multiple varietal representations of the wine life can lead to a wider and more hospitable view of wine’s magic, they’d counter that no other grape offers such an abundance of soul when it is done correctly. They would, of course, be right.
Unmask the grape, leave away the wood and the over-extraction; eschew bigness and choose instead just the simple, unadulterated, the I-get-up-out-of-bed-looking-like-this gorgeousness, and you have the truest expression of Cabernet Franc. No other grape is as consistently surprising and reaffirming at the same time. When you drink Cabernet Sauvignon consistently, especially from the same region, what you get are differences in amplitude, not differences in the strings and heart of the wine. Hey, singer X is great and all that, but there is nothing to be learned from him if all you do is change the volume. That’s Cabernet Sauvignon. Cabernet Franc is that singer, but that singer if he changed to a she then changed back to a different he, was French, then sang the ululations of certain South African tribes, then sang the operas of Puccini, then yodeled as none has ever yodeled before.
The best Cab Franc continually resonates at a pitch and frequency just out of the range of comfortable explication. It is the great conniver, is Cabernet Franc. At one moment it is as prosaic in the nose as mediocre Merlot – all cherry and wood. In the next though, it’s as mysterious as the first time you got her panties off. It smells of ash from a day-old fire on the beach or bitter chocolate ladled over with brandied raisins. In the mouth, the best of wines make you feel as if you’re on skates being blown across ice – the blades cut deep but all you sense is the thrilling movement forward; that’s Cabernet Franc on its second-best day. Cabernet Franc could be all corset and hair-bun if she weren’t such a sexy bitch. Just one mouthful of really good Cabernet Franc and you know she knows a hell of a lot more about all things sweaty and carnal than you ever will. She enters slowly and dances languidly at first. You turn your head away, disinterested. It’s then that she preens and polishes; her movements, then, become precise and rhythmic and self-possessed. As the story unfolds in the inflection of hip and the accent of breast, you are compelled to look at her true and are…lost. Pinot Noir is all intellect. Cabernet Franc is about the orgasm.
ii
The Judgment of Paris taught us that there was little difference in quality and characteristic between Cabernet and Chardonnay made in France and in California. Some of the best tasters in the world: restaurateurs, wine writers, domaine owners – experts all, changed the story of wine for the world, not just California, that July day. In 1976 to celebrate America’s Bicentennial, Stephen Spurrier, an Englishman who had a wineshop in Paris, had heard about the rise in quality of New World wines from his Californian assistant. To promote his store, he got French and Californian wines together, and the winning wines warped time. Golden State wines would have eventually ascended the ladder of public visibility and critical opinion, but Spurrier’s publicity stunt was like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs and ushered in the new age. The results also showed something more prosaic: two of the finest grapes grown, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, made wines practically indistinguishable from each other despite 6,000 miles and a thousand years of separation.
While there were many factors at play in this legendary tasting that led to this conclusion, one of the most interesting to me is that it showed that Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay have a fairly narrow range of flavors and structures (if one forgets and forgives outlandish winemaking interference) while others such as Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand and Cabernet Franc from Chinon are about as idiosyncratic and singularly identifiable as grapes get. Had the group chosen to taste Pinot Noir blind or Cabernet Franc, Sauvignon Blanc, even, there would have been little doubt as to the provenance of wines they were tasting.
Cabernet Franc was found by UC Davis professors in 1997 to have come up on unsuspecting Sauvignon Blanc in some tangled thicket, and this vinous booty call birthed the noble Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s a wonderful trick of Nature that a grape that is synonymous with the most substantial and age-worthy of red wines – rich and tannic, breathlessly undrinkable while young in its Bordeaux incarnation – is the offspring of a white grape and a grape that, in its purest state, is fulsomely red in fruit, spritely in acid, smelling of a day-old bonfire on a beach, with a precision of structure and flavor that just knocks you out. I started making Cabernet Franc in 2005, though I didn’t really know what I was doing. Lynch’s wines, an evolving palate, and the cold season of 2011 conspired to put me on the right track, however. This amazing grape has become so important to us, and to the future of the Livermore Valley, that we started a new brand called L’Autre Côte, that will comprise only Cabernet Franc from the most felicitous sites. Northern France is not California, of course. Differences in temperature, length of the growing season, clones of Cabernet Franc, age of vineyards, historicity of the varietal itself all separate these separate places. A spell of bad weather in 2011, though, helped me luck into a style of Cab Franc that reminded me a touch of those glorious Loire Valley wines that opened my mind half a decade earlier.
The wine business can be complicated and making great wine has much more to do with feel and philosophy than it does with science. There is one monstrously important factor, though, that we can rely on in California that gives us a huge advantage and that takes away a lot of the risk with which agriculture is inherently saddled: we have great weather. While winemakers in Burgundy are worrying their fingers to nubs wondering if the solitary cloud on the horizon will bloom black into a harvest – and livelihood-destroying hailstorm – the California winemaker many more times than not gently rouses himself from his sun-soaked afternoon nap, puts his finger in the air, and decides that it’s probably time to bring some fruit in. An exaggeration, yes. But not when describing the string of years of clement weather we enjoy in the Livermore Valley. 2011 was a different beast all-together.
In the winter we hope for rain here. Livermore only gets about 14 inches of rain per year, and in the decade of the ’10s there were a number of years where the totals were dramatically lower than this, and December through March were bone dry. The winter of 2011 started, though, with torrential rain, vineyards couldn’t soak all the water in and much of it rode off away in the arroyos that bisect our vineyard. Along with all the water, the weather in April and May (during budbreak, bloom, and flowering) was unseasonably cold. The grapes got a late start, mildew and mold pressures grew in the vineyard with the days of rain and the lack of warm weather to dry the vines out, and, as the season progressed, signs of ripeness in our Cabernet Sauvignon blocks were difficult to discern.
Unripe Cabernet Sauvignon is an ugly thing. It can taste of bell peppers and stewed asparagus; Sauvignon Blanc, one of its progenitors, afflicted with similar concentrations of methoxypyrazine, can smell of jalapeno peppers and cat pee¾undelicious. Pyrazines, as they are commonly called, are compounds that give bell peppers their characteristic aromas and flavors, and they also live in the skins of the Cabernet family of grapes. With direct sunlight, UV radiation metabolizes these compounds out of the skins and very ripe Cabernet loses all of this herbal quality, substituting uncomplicated draughts of jammy and ripe berry in its place. Similarly, Sauvignon Blanc changes from this funky pepper/urine-stained dreck to a citrus-addled, wonderfully clean and refreshing ravisher. This relationship between direct sunlight and pyrazine has an overly dramatic effect on Cabernet Franc. Compared to Cabernet Sauvignon, Cab Franc’s body is lighter and more transparent. Unbalanced pyrazines can color Cabernet Franc like a bad tattoo, and as permanently. Because working the edges is where all the risk and all the fun is, I strive to pick Cab Franc just when it has crossed over from the dank side into the light. I want herbs. I want my Cabernet Franc to be infused with the unmistakable redolence of fresh bay and sage. The picking decision, then, is crucial. Too early means the green of rotting vegetables; too late is flaccid and uninspiring pie filling. Getting it right is the difference between the supple muscularity of youth and the flab of the athlete gone to seed.
Though it rained throughout much of the summer and made the harvest of several of our Cabernet Sauvignon blocks a muddy mess, the growing season was long enough that we were able to pick enough fruit at sufficient ripeness to make some of the best wines we have made. We weren’t able to make a lot, as much of the fruit never recovered from the ungentle start to the season, but what did come in was gorgeous. Our 2011 Cabernet Franc thrived. Harvested in a short window between storms, the fruit came in several weeks later than the preceding and subsequent vintages and arrived at the winery disease-free and tasting beautifully.
In the cellar, fermentation proceeded without a hitch. As the wine approached dryness, I would shove my hand through the cap of skins and grab some of the still-fermenting wine with a beaker and taste its progress. Each day, the wine seemed to grow darker and richer. What would become notes of soy sauce seven or eight years after the harvest could be gleaned in the increasing substantiality of the wine. There never was any doubt, though, as to its varietal provenance. Those thrumming notes of bay and sage, beneficent and pure, leapt from the glass, and the wine danced energetically on the palate under the influence of graceful acidity. 2011 was a sex bomb! With age the wine showed more and more complexity of flavor and aroma while sticking beautifully to its austere structural core. Wow! One of my favorite wines.
Sometimes you get lucky in these kinds of conditions, and a winemaker’s mettle is tested. These years are the most fun because you are riding such a narrow edge. Missing the pick by even a day can be catastrophic when the next weather front may be only a few hours away. In California, winemakers can add water and tartaric acid (among many other things…practically all of which we eschew) if the fruit comes in a little too ripe. It is much more difficult to ameliorate a fermenter-full of fruit that comes in significantly unripe. Though the marginal years lead to more challenge and more seat-of-your-pants winemaking, I think I’ll stick to the eight years out of 10 where the year is so good that if you can’t make great wine then you really should be cobbling shoes.
iii
The intervening years from 2011 to today have been mostly fortuitous as the weather goes. The one exception for us was 2015. And here, again, we made a Cabernet Franc that skirted that ripeness line all throughout fermentation to come out on the other side, smoking hot! I took a calculated risk on the picking day hoping that the lower sugar levels on the bottom of the block would be balanced out by the slightly higher sugar in the middle of the block. I was hoping for 22o brix and ended up with 20. Quelle catastrophe! 20o brix is where you would pick Pinot Noir or Chardonnay or Barbera for sparkling wine, not Cabernet Franc for…well, Cabernet Franc. When we got the wine into barrels it was green as a Leprechaun’s civvies. We decided to add just a bit more new oak to the blend as wood barrels have a way of integrating with pyrazine to reduce its influence. We stirred the barrels weekly as if we were making Chardonnay. Mixing the lees frequently and letting this solid matter descend slowly back to the bottom of the barrel has a way of adding a touch of richness to the wine and mitigating the green as well. Each week I would come to this pyramid of barrels and taste, and – at the beginning – I’d be heartsick, not only trying to figure out what to do with this fuck-up, but also lamenting the loss of a season’s worth of my favorite grape. Everything can be done correctly, and failure may still be the result. Sometimes, too, your intuition leads you down an errant, twisty path that drops you, eventually, to the spot you steered toward at the start.
Over the months however, what was bell pepper evolved into the clean and dried herbal notes that bespeak true Cabernet Franc. The texture of the wine also evolved from knife’s-edge acid to something slightly less sharp, from shards of glass to freshly laundered cotton. This evolution did not proceed in a straight line, to be sure. There were weeks that the wine was barely drinkable and others when it sang like a young Nina Simone. Like all wines with potential, the 2015 Cab Franc became at its own pace and took a shape completely in harmony with the blocks that were there, in the beginning, to build. I count this wine as one of my favorites. And if quality comprises careful shepherding and proportionate freaking out and an acceptance on the part of the winemaker that what is there is beautiful, for all its idiosyncrasies, then this wine is, too, one my successes.
It is an interesting twist to the global warming story that causes me to be so certain that the Livermore Valley will be a spectacular growing area for Cabernet Franc. Livermore is dependent upon and circumscribed by the wind that comes in daily from the San Francisco Bay. Due to the increases in temperature in the Central Valley to the east of Livermore, which serves as the engine that powers the vacuum that sucks in this cool air, wind enters the Valley earlier in the day, attenuating the amount of ripening that happens that day. The vine protects itself from the moisture-robbing characteristic of the wind by shutting down its microscopic pores, called stoma. The stoma regulate water usage, but they also restrict the amount of CO2 the plant can take in. Carbon dioxide is used in photosynthesis for the production of sugar. With reduced sugar production each day, it takes longer for fruit to get to optimal ripeness. Earlier ripening varieties like Cabernet Franc (compared to Cabernet Sauvignon), will end up being privileged by these conditions.
It does not matter that the notion of a grape being associated with a specific place is a European one, the ability for Livermore to be associated with a world-class variety (like Napa with Cabernet Sauvignon) that it “owns” in the mind of the wine press and the consumer has business implications that could allow a small region like Livermore to thrive. Our L’Autre Côte brand will be dedicated, then, to making stunning and delicious Cabernet Franc and proving again the validity of the terroir-driven model.