Dana Estates

THE BEST NAPA CABERNET 2008 – DANA LOTUS VINEYARD CABERNET SAUVIGNON

By Fine Wine magazines

The challenging vintage of 2008 set the Napa vintners in position where understanding of the terroir factors of their vineyard site proved to be critical. Only by understanding the terroir of each plot of vines, the wine producer was able to make the necessary decisions in the vineyards on supporting the vines during their growth cycle and helping them to produce the best quality fruit.

As results of our tasting, we may conclude that the best Napa Valley wine producers succeeded from the challenge incredibly well. The quality of the wines shows great if not excellent. While all tasted wines will reach their optimum drinkability after 10 to 15 years there were great deal of surprisers according to wines current enjoyability. The winner of the best Napa Cabernet 2008 goes to a newcomer in Napa Valley, Dana Estates, whose Lotus single-vineyard wine which charmed us with its opulence, depth and elegance.

Out of the three Dana Estate owned vineyards, the Lotus vineyard located on St. Helena hillsides, stands at 1200 feet above sea level with a beautiful panoramic view of the Napa Valley floor.

This steep hillside vineyard is spread over the rocky, low-yielding soils with Western exposure. Thanks to the influence of the afternoon sun, the wines shows ripe and rich fruitiness while the three to twelve inches, fractured grey bedrock soil generates the marked mineral structure to the wine.

“This is incredibly dry, well-drained soil that has very low water holding capacity and in dry, warm vintages it reflects outstanding a level of grape ripeness,” Vawter sums up. 

The vintage 2008

“2008 proved to be a tremendously challenging vintage, yet it ultimately produced some of the best wines of this decade. The vintage characteristics were defined primarily by the strongest La Niña spring for two decades,” Cameron Vawter, the winemaker of Dana Estate points out.

According to Vawter, the dry La Niña winter and an unusually warm March led to the earliest bud break on record for many of Dana Estate vineyard blocks. 

“This seemed like a good thing until temperatures plummeted in late April and gave us the worst frost season in over thirty years. We used our frost fans for 32 nights during the spring. The frost, combined with some cool bloom temperatures, led to a very uneven veraison. This vintage was like no other vintage that I have experienced. A vintage is really made up of winter rains to fill the soil profile, the spring’s ability to dry the profile, summer’s ability to hold constant and then September’s warmth to either push ripening or allow it to happen slowly.”

Vawter comments also that the previous generation of Napa winemakers has compared the vintage 2008 to the spring of 1972, when the last really serious frost was experienced in the valley. However, apart from spring, he outlines that 2008 was actually a very dry, hot vintage. 

“It had more heat spikes than any recent vintage. These heat spikes actually stunt a grape’s ability to ripen, and this is one reason the vintage boasts such purity and great acidity. The ripening was very rapid, preserving much of the freshness,” Vawter explains. 

Dana Estate is owned by South Korean winelover, Mr. Hi Sang Lee, who first fell in love with wine more than 40 years ago, when he lived in New York City. In the early 1990s he founded Nara Cellar, a wine importing business in South Korea. In 2006 he opened Podo Plaza, a cutting edge food and wine center in Seoul that contains a wine bar, retail store, wine academy (WSET) and cooking school (Japanese Culinary Institute).

Through his import business, Mr. Lee has been responsible for bringing the world’s most sought-after luxury wines to the Korean market, including Harlan, Shafer and Colgin, and has increased awareness and appreciation for world-class wines in his home country.

The import business has brought Lee to the Napa Valley regularly for more than ten years, allowing him to develop an understanding of luxury wine production and form close relationships with the people whose wine he imports. These relationships were integral in bringing his dream of creating his own wine brand to fruition: Lee was able to acquire coveted vineyard land, as well as gain access to some of the most talented people in the industry. Mr. Lee purchased the Helms Vineyard and the winery in 2005. The winery is listed as one of the “ghost wineries” of the Napa Valley and was originally built by H.W. Helms, a German vintner in1883.  The purchase of Hershey and Lotus vineyards took place in 2006.

Dana Estates produces three single vineyards wines, from sites that are dramatically different from one another. Each vineyard is farmed organically at low yields to allow the unique qualities of each site to be expressed in the bottle.  Multiple passes through the vineyards are made during harvest, and only the purest expressions of fruit and most balanced lots make it into Dana wines. Depending on the character of each lot, blocks are fermented in either concrete tanks, oak uprights or small barrels to enhance vineyard characteristics and help produce wines of distinction and sophistication.

Helms Vineyard

This gently sloping site is relatively cool, and is protected from the intensity of the late afternoon heat during the height of the growing season.  The gravelly loam soils provide excellent drainage and wonderful fruit purity. Helms Vineyard Cabernet displays the classic profile of the Rutherford Bench: dark fruit, richly layered with a touch of spice and earth. The finely grained “dusty” tannins so prevalent in the appellation are integrated and harmonious, producing a wine of sophistication and depth.

Hershey Vineyard

The incredibly rocky, rhyolitic soils of this Howell Mountain site provide fruit with structure and depth, yet the cool climate produces a wine of restraint and vibrant acidity. An underlying minerality gives the wine a particularly distinctive character and provides another layer of complexity. The appellation has become a favorite of collectors who value the ageworthy capacity of wines from this elevation.

Lotus Vineyard

Located at 1200 feet above sea level in the Vaca Mountains on the east side of the valley, Lotus is the warmest of our three vineyards.  With rocky soils and low yielding vines facing west that embrace the afternoon sun, Lotus produces a wine of power and concentration.  Packed with layers of black fruit, with notes of mocha, anise and graphite, Lotus tends to be the most full bodied of the three wines we produce.

The winemaking practices are based on site-oriented wine production where philosophy is adapted from Burgundy and where organic farming plays a critical part.

“Organic farming allows the vineyard to truly express itself and not input upon input from a man. The site is irrigated minimally and even dry farming is taking place when possible to highlight the expression of both vintage and vineyard. In winemaking, the fermentation takes place in concrete vats under the influence of indigenous yeasts,” Vawter says. According to his experience, the concrete tanks enhance the terroir focus along with the fruit characteristics of the wine and soften the chunky tannins discreetly. The fermentation process is remained not intervened despite the sulphur addition which is kept to a minimum. The wines are aged in French oak barrels for 1.5 to 2 years. No fining or filtration takes place.