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”THE BEST NAPA CABERNET 2008” – DANA LOTUS VINEYARD CABERNET SAUVIGNON/
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.
The Quality of the Wine
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.
Wine Description
The Story
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.
