2018

A Stellar Season: Tasting the 2019 Vintage Through Premiere Napa Valley

As we have all been experiencing, the pandemic changed everything. So it was no surprise when the Napa Valley Vintners Association postponed their annual fundraising event known as Premiere Napa Valley, which usually takes place in February each year. It also wasn’t much of a surprise that when they finally did hold it last weekend in Napa, it bore little resemblance to the usual seething crowd of trade and media wandering through the barrel room at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone Castle.

Instead, this year was an intimate, outdoor affair reserved for the most successful past bidders, and the only tasting of the barrel samples available at auction were at a few small events around Napa and sets of half-bottles that the Vintners and their winery members painstakingly assembled to send to prospective bidders.

Long-time readers will know that the Premiere barrel tasting is something like my annual blood-sport ritual, where I attempt to taste all 200+ wines before the annual auction gets underway.

That was not an option this year, but I did manage to taste a number of the lots, many from the comfort of my own dining room, which afforded me the opportunity to spend more time with each wine and make much more complete tasting notes than usual.

The Allure of a Great Vintage

It’s hard to know how much of this year’s successful haul was about the wines themselves, and how much was an industry showing its support under the most unusual of circumstances. But we can’t rule out the fact that most of the wines on offer were from the 2019 vintage.

One of the primary reasons I attempt to taste widely at Premiere each year is that it affords an opportunity to take a look at what you might characterize as the pinnacle of the vintage. Most producers attempt to offer if not their absolute best, certainly one of their highest quality wines made each year. Consequently, these wines show the best of what is possible given the conditions of the vintage, sparing no expense.

The 2018 vintage was an extremely hard act to follow: generous yields, perfect weather, no heatwaves. It was a superstar year and it resulted in some truly phenomenal wines.

And what about 2019? Well it was basically the same, if just ever-so-slightly cooler than 2018.

Just as with 2018, it was a year in which you’d have to try pretty hard to make a bad wine.

After a surprisingly heavy amount of rain in May (more than 3 inches in some places) the remainder of the spring and summer unfurled calm and untroubled. Mild weather, the lack of heat spells, and the good amount of soil moisture made for a growing season that was as long as anyone wanted it to be, at least until the start of the Kincaid Fire in Sonoma County on October 23rd. Anyone in Napa who hadn’t gotten their fruit in by that time was able to do so in quick order and without incident, making for an astonishingly good harvest.

Just as with 2018, it was a year in which you’d have to try pretty hard to make a bad wine. Having said that, looking at my scores for the 19s and collecting my impressions after tasting a bunch of them, I’m still going to give the edge to the 2018 vintage in terms of my preference.

Yields were down a bit from the very generous 2018, and I think that made, in some cases, for some more concentrated wines in 2019. That may sound great to some wine lovers, but for those of us who prefer a bit more finesse and elegance to go along with the raw power of our Napa wines, it may be that the larger yields offered just a bit more juice to skin ratio, and therefore wines that were slightly less heavy than their 2019 siblings.

Really, I’m splitting hairs here, and it may well be that with a little more time the 2019s will show that they are superior, but if they are, it won’t be by much.

The best of the 2019 wines, like those of 2018, show incredibly fine-grained tannic structure, and fabulous acidity to complement perfectly ripe fruit. Some of my favorites have a lift and a juiciness that was simply breathtaking. I’ll occasionally give my wife a sip of a particularly good sample that I’m tasting if she happens to walk through the room. As I was tasting some of these Premiere samples, I gave her a taste of the wine made by Rosemary Cakebread, Cathy Corison, Dawnine Dyer, and Diana Seysses. Her eyes lit up and she grabbed the little half-bottle, hugged it to her chest, and ran out of the room yelling, “Buy some steaks for dinner!”

While almost all of the wines below will be out of reach for even typically spendy Napa fans, you can still use my scores as a buying guide. Anyone who made a rockstar wine below for $300+ a bottle will likely have done a pretty damn good job with their standard $80 wine, so keep your eyes and ears out for the 2019s when they hit the market in late 2022 or early 2023.

Here are my scores for everything I tasted.

“WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 9.5

2019 Viader Vineyards & Winery “Block B7” Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley – Lot# 138 – Dark garnet in the glass, this barrel sample smells of cherry and cedar and dried flowers. In the mouth, gorgeous cherry and cedar notes mix with dried flowers and herbs. Fine-grained tannins wrap like a fleece blanket around the bright core of the wine. Excellent acidity keeps the mouth-watering. This is quite delicious. This was a small hand-selected group of vines grown in rocky, red volcanic soils separated at harvest from the rest of the lot. Clusters were destemmed and the fruit was placed directly into a new Sylvain French oak 500L fermenter barrel. Skin contact was extended over 14 months and the wine is aged in a 500-liter French oak barrel. Mother and son winemaking team of Delia and Alan Viader.”