San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The groovy ’70s are making a comeback — with Napa Valley wines
Younger California vintners find inspiration, but winemakers from that era question romanticization
It isn’t just flared jeans and Fleetwood Mac. There’s another relic of the 1970s experiencing a comeback: the decade’s Napa Valley wines.
Younger California vintners these days routinely cite “Napa from the 1970s” as their inspiration. Lately, the subject has come up almost weekly in my interviews with winemakers, including many who aren’t making wine in Napa Valley at all. They describe their intended style as “retro.”
What these ’70s worshipers are trying to emulate, broadly, is Cabernet Sauvignon that was low in alcohol, with chewy tannins and plenty of vegetal flavors — a style that fell out of favor in the ’80s and ’90s when Napa Valley wines got riper, fruitier and more polished.
Yet ’70s Napa may have become so idealized now that it’s entered the realm of myth. “There is something very romantic about those wines that’s worthy of worship,” said Kelli White, author of “Napa Valley Then & Now.” “But also, people are making a lot of assumptions about how these wines were made that aren’t necessarily true.”
When asked about their protocols, many winemakers who were working in Napa throughout the ’70s laughed. “It was simple: Nobody knew what they were doing,” said Randy Dunn, who worked at Caymus Vineyards from 1975-1985. “It was the blind leading the blind.”
The winemakers from that period are unequivocal: “I think our wines are far better now than they ever were in the ’70s,” said Tim Mondavi, who joined his family’s Robert Mondavi Winery fulltime in 1974.
If these vintners feel nostalgic for the ’70s, it’s because it felt like a magical, heady time, said Mondavi, “a time of experimental endeavor.” It’s not because they miss the wines themselves.
Napa wine’s modern era is often considered to have begun in 1966, with the founding of Robert Mondavi, the first significant new winery to open after Prohibition. Its early success, coupled with a widely read bank report that predicted wine would become a sound financial investment, led to an explosion of new wineries in the early 1970s. A single year saw the creation of so many estates that the group has become known as the “class of 1972.” The famous Judgment of Paris, in 1976, in which French wine experts judged California wines to be superior to their own, established Napa Valley’s reputation as a world-class wine region for the first time.
The energy was so experimental, in fact, that the most distinctive qualities of ’70s Napa wines are largely accidental. Those low alcohol levels of 11%12%? (That’s far lower than the 14%-15% that’s common among Napa Cabernets today.) That was simply because many of the valley’s vineyards were infected
with viruses and couldn’t get very ripe. “We didn’t see alcohol as a choice,” said Zelma Long, the Robert Mondavi winemaker from 1970-1979.
Those gritty, rustic tannins? Partly the result of crude machinery (Dunn described his crusher as a “meat grinder monster”) that tore up the grapes, releasing harsh, astringent textures from the grape skins and seeds into the juice. “Nobody who’s lived through the ’70s wants to go back to that equipment,” said Stu Smith, who co-founded Smith-Madrone Vineyards in 1974.
Those green, herbal flavors? Those are due to compounds called pyrazines, which can be mitigated by increasing the sun exposure on the vine. But “we didn’t know anything about that until the late ’70s,” said
Smith. The flavors appeared whether the winemakers wanted them or not.
Many practices that were standard in the ’70s would
make today’s minimal-intervention-minded winemakers shudder. Terms like “organic farming” were not in the lexicon. Old, poorly cleaned barrels could imbue wines with unwanted bacteria. It was common to dilute unbalanced wines with large volumes of water. “You didn’t really talk about adding water, but everybody did it,” said Dunn.
Today, winemakers love to say that “wine is made in the vineyard,” boasting of their involvement in the farming process. In the ’70s, many farmers wanted to keep the winemakers as far away from the vines as possible. Tom Ferrell, who became the Inglenook winemaker in 1970, recalled that once, when he brought interns to a vineyard to inspect the ripening grapes, the vineyard owner fired a shotgun over the students’ heads to shoo them away.
As with the decade’s music, art, fashion and film, the wines of the groovy 1970s preceded those of the glitzy, opulent 1980s. In 1979, the Rothschilds — the most famous family in France’s Bordeaux — came to Napa to co-found, with the Mondavis, Opus One Winery. The presence of French wine royalty signaled that Napa Valley had really arrived.
And by the late 1980s, with the grape pest phylloxera having wiped out the majority of California’s vineyards, a massive replanting effort was underway. The new vineyards were virus-free, and the vines were trellised in a novel way that promoted sun exposure, maximizing ripeness and minimizing pyrazines. Napa was now transforming into a valley of sparkly new grapevines and alluring, seductive wines.
The winemakers who lived through those decades believe that the new technology, knowledge exchange with other global regions and improved farming techniques all changed their wines for the better. Today’s wines “have warmth and lusciousness and delicious, ripe tannin,” said Ric Forman, the winemaker at Sterling Vineyards from 1969-1978. “They’re not these mean, tart little Cabernets.”
White doesn’t see the ’70s wines as mean and tart. “They are incredibly perfumed,” she said. “They have this freshness, bright acidity.” In the end, the younger set may have more love for these wines than the winemakers who made them. They wouldn’t be the first to embrace decades-old trends that their parents’ generation outgrew, or to rekindle nostalgia for a time they never lived through.
“I think what they may be saying is they don’t want to make wines that all taste alike,” said Dunn of his younger industry colleagues. More than the pyrazine, the low alcohol, the gritty tannin or any other specific trait, maybe what they love about these wines is how idiosyncratic they are, unburdened by the heavy expectations that came to weigh on Napa Valley in the years to come. Transformative, countercultural, free: It doesn’t get more ’70s than that.