California Bests Bordeaux Again. It Means Nothing.
California Bests Bordeaux Again.
Head to head battle with the best that California has to offer will always be met with disappointment for a number of reasons which are never discussed. The first is that the best California Cabernets (and Chardonnays, for that matter) are quite good. The winner of the recent showdown comes out of the chute, though, at $200-300 a bottle year after year. It should be good for that kind of money. A lot of care is put into these top drawer wines. These are small production, hand made boutique wines. Often only a few hundred cases are made. Chateau Latour cranks out 20,000 cases of stunning wine. Latour came in fifth. Abreu came in first. Abreu makes 500 cases. How about finding some guy who makes one lone great bottle of wine and letting him enter too. This production difference in itself is laughable.
That said many of the ultra-small production operations did poorly in the listing with Screaming Eagle, Harlan and Diamond Creek falling into the bottom three. Nobody wants to mention that especially when you consider that Screaming Eagle and Harlan are much more expensive than Abreu. And on the other end of the spectrum the flashy Beringer Private Reserve, while not with the production numbers of Latour, the volume is at least credible.
Another thing about this list is that all it seems to show is that the two groups of wines are so intermixed that you cannot declare one region to be better than the other at this level. But the comparison ends there. Going down a level to more common wines and California simply runs out of wineries with perhaps 500 wineries in California lining up against 8500 or so in Bordeaux.
A third issue is the age-worthy aspects of the wines along with the characteristic changes that take place with the top level Bordeaux. New flavors and aromas emerge from the French wines which never show up in the California wines. California wines can age well but never evolve into anything different. Not all the Bordeaux can manage this trick but many can and do.
And any wine drinker knows that drinking wine and tasting it are two different things. Many of the flashy wines are almost designed to do well at tastings. But pair that same wine at a meal with a slice of Boucheron and the combination tastes like crap whilst a cheap Loire red will match beautifully.
Anyway here is the list from Decanter (above). Note some weird duplication (eg Mouton):
1 Abreu (Madrona Ranch)
1 Beringer Private Reserve
3 Pahlmeyer Propriatory Red
3 Valandraud
5 Latour
5 Shafer Hillside Select
7 Arrowood Cabernet Sauvignon Special Reserve
7 Ausone
9 Leoville Les Cases
9 Phelps Insignia
11 Mouton Rothschild
12 Mondavi Reserve
13 Cheval Blanc
13 Palmer
15 Staglin Family Vineyard Cabernet
16 Trotonoy
17 Araujo
18 La Jota Anniversary Reserve
18 Le Bon Pasteur
20 Pride Reserve
21 Haut Condissas
22 Spring Mountain
23 Petrus
23 Rollan de By
25 Chateau Montelena
26 Mouton Rothschild
27 Monte Bello Ridge
28 Cheval Blanc
29 Dominus
30 Colgin
31 Margaux
32 Spotteswoode
33 Le Tertre Roteboeuf
34 Haut Brion
35 La Mission Haut Brion
36 Croix de Labrie
37 Screaming Eagle
38 Harlan Estate
39 Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill