How well does Stags Leap District wine age? Thoughts on a 25-year blind vertical tasting

Digital art by Daniel Eskridge

Earlier this month I attended an interesting blind tasting held by Stags Leap District Winegrowers. We tried 18 Cabernet Sauvignons from 13 vintages dating back to 1991. It was an unusual setup because the wines were from 18 different wineries.

Even so, it was easy to track the progression in ripeness in Napa. The wines from 2003 on were mostly made with different intentions than the earlier wines. Most had more up-front fruit that tastes darker, and I wonder how they will age. That's not the goal of most of Napa Valley anymore -- or for that matter, of most wineries in the world -- and I'm not here to pretend that it should be.

The older wines in this tasting were cherry-picked because the wineries think they're still tasting good. It's very different from going to a winery and tasting 10 vintages in a row. The two oldest wines in the tasting were two of my favorites, but that doesn't mean those wineries consistently make age-worthy wines. Once in New Mexico I tasted a 10-year-old Pinot Noir that was fabulous and I wondered why the winery had stopped making still wines. "That was the only good one we made," the winemaker told me. So you never know.

But that said, here were the highlights, some lowlights, and random thoughts from the tasting.

Don't die before drinking your best wines: What I learned when my plane caught fire

I thought this might be the last photo of me, and I was OK with that

I learned I won a Born Digital Wine Award on Thursday night, while at the home of my friend Eduardo Brethauer in Santiago, Chile. We celebrated briefly, but without even sharing any wine because I had a plane to catch.

Eight hours later that plane was on fire over the Pacific Ocean. And I really, really regretted not having had a glass of bubbly with Eduardo.

Obviously there is a happy ending as I am not writing this from beyond the grave. But for 25 minutes, smoke slowly wisped through the front of the cabin and tense messages from the crew reminded us where the life vests were under each kind of seat. I had time for regrets. And a surprising number were about wine.

Wine is like TV: there are no more bad vintages like 1969

 We finished behind what?

My favorite TV critic, Alan Sepinwall, co-authored a new book purporting to rank the top 100 TV shows of all time. It's easy to nitpick: Cheers above Breaking Bad? But the rankings are theirs, not mine, and this is a great opportunity to reintroduce the best column I've ever read about people who bitch about Top 100 lists like this.

We are living in the best era ever for American television, and the works in progress listed in the back of the book, not ranked because their stories haven't finished, constitute a better "vintage" of television than any previous year.

That got me to thinking about wine. People of a certain age remember printed vintage charts that oenophiles carried in their wallets. Until about 20 years ago, most wine lovers thought about a vintage mainly by how good or bad it was in Bordeaux. That was a measure of how important Bordeaux was in the wine world, but also of how bad a bad vintage in Bordeaux could be: The wines were actually unpleasant to drink. The same was true in Burgundy. It wasn't until Napa Valley came to prominence in the 1990s that the world discovered a great wine region where a "bad" vintage didn't mean terrible wines.

Nowadays, though, there simply is not a bad vintage for wine as a whole.

Is this wine good for Thanksgiving? Take the quiz! (5 questions)

Thanksgiving is one of the trickiest holidays for people who like wine but aren't obsessive about it. One of the questions wine experts get asked most often is: is this a good Thanksgiving wine?

At The Gray Report we're here to help with a simple 5-question quiz. You don't have to know anything about wine in general. If only cooking a perfect turkey was this easy!

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How common are Champagne-related deaths?

Did Champagne kill Cassandra Lynn Hensley? Answer below!

There's a stat kicking around the Internet: that 24 people a year die from Champagne corks. I won't link to any stories just now to build suspense. But the number is oddly specific.

I decided to briefly look into this before fact-checking becomes illegal in the United States. How safe are your children around Champagne? Think of the children!

Here's what I could come up with:

What President Trump means for the wine world

Photo by Jennifer C. Martin

President-elect Donald Trump owns a winery, but does not drink.

If the U.S. wine industry is looking for comfort in the wake of the election, it's in the first part of that sentence. Trump is unlikely to pursue legislation or regulations that hurt his own businesses.

People are not going to stop drinking because Trump is President. George W. Bush was a teetotaller and U.S. wine consumption rose steadily throughout his tenure.

However, foreign wine producers dependent on the U.S. market cannot feel comfortable today.

When French leaders spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq under Bush, many U.S. drinkers turned their backs on French wine. No matter that France was right: we didn't want to hear it. People even renamed fried potatoes as "Freedom Fries."

French President Francois Hollande once said that Trump made him want to retch. His personal dislike of Trump may not matter.

Tawny Port's popularity, such as it is, comes from San Francisco restaurants

George Sandeman

Tawny Port, now easily the best-selling fortified wine in the US, is apparently a San Francisco phenomenon.

George Sandeman, chairman of the brand named after his ancestors (it's now owned by Sogrape), told this story while promoting a new bottle design for Sandeman Tawny Ports.

Sandeman Tawny Ports now look just like whiskey. This is an attempt to confer some of whiskey's cachet with millennials, but I digress. Here's the San Francisco-discovers-Tawny story.

Sandeman said he was working in New York for the big wine importer Chateau & Estate Wines. Sales of vintage Port in San Francisco were dead.

My top wine and spirits stories in October

I wrote one of these, and one of those ...

Every month I write a bunch of stories about wine that don't appear on my blog. Unless you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you don't know these stories exist, so I look even lazier than I am.

Here are some of my best stories from October.

Against local liquor: I'm as much a locavore as anyone, but for whiskey I make an exception because I prefer whiskey that tastes good.

Pacific Northwest harvest the new normal: What kind of vintage was 2016 in Oregon and Washington? Depends on what side of the Columbia River you're on.

Jackson Family Wines swallows up another Oregon winery: Global warming and seemingly the end of bad vintages make Oregon vineyards a different kind of commercial commodity.

Another top vintage for Northern California: Was there ever any doubt?

Wine Blogging 101: What college students asked me about wine and blogging: A reminder to prepare yourself to answer the basics.

Constellation buys Charles Smith wines: In 2010, Charles Smith sued one or more of my blog commenters! Fortunately now that he's been paid $120 million, it's safe to comment again. Probably.

Unnecessary wine appliance seduces media: I know more about this device now than when I wrote the story, so maybe there will be another story in the future. For now, enjoy the snark.

And my favorite post from this blog last month, ICYMI:

Donald Trump, sommelier: Because you're going to pay for that wine. I promise you, you're going to pay for that wine.

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