Napa Valley receives about four million visitors a year, and most of them drink wine that is not worth drinking. This is not a controversial statement among people who work in wine. It is simply a description of the economic reality of a region where land costs have made sensible wine production economically impossible for most producers, and where the economics of the tasting room — where most visitors actually purchase wine — reward spectacle over quality.
The good news is that Napa also produces some of the world’s most serious Cabernet Sauvignon. The best Napa wines are extraordinary. Understanding how to find them, and how to avoid everything else, is the actual skill of drinking in Napa.
What to Skip
The first thing to skip is any tasting room experience that charges more than $50 for a basic tasting and promises “the best Cabernet in Napa.” These experiences are selling atmosphere, architecture, and the Napa fantasy. The wine is usually mediocre at best and expensive everywhere.
The “cult wine” tastings at Opus One, Screaming Eagle, and their imitators are worth doing once if you can get a reservation and want to understand what the Napa luxury market is selling. They are not worth doing if you want to understand Napa wine.
The bulk producers on the valley floor — the names you’ll see on billboards, the places with large parking lots — make wine that is technically correct and commercially designed to appeal to the widest possible market. This is fine wine in the same way that a fine hamburger is fine food. It is not why you came to wine country.
What to Actually Drink
The mountain AVAs — especially the Napa Valley sub-appellations on the eastern mountains — produce Cabernet Sauvignon of a different character than the valley floor. The volcanic and volcanic-alluvial soils, combined with cooler temperatures from elevation, produce wines of more structure and complexity.
Mount Veeder: One of the most consistent high-quality mountain appellations, producing Cabernets with more tannins, more herbal notes, and more complexity than valley floor wines. Schrand Cellars and Mt. Veeder Winery are reliable producers.
Atlas Peak: Higher and cooler than most of Napa, producing Cabernets with more structure and longer aging potential. Ovid is the most famous producer, and their wines are serious, but they’re priced for collectors, not visitors.
Spring Mountain District: A small AVA on the western slopes that has produced some remarkable wines, particularly from Stuart Smith and Keenan. The wines tend toward richness and body with good structure.
The old vines: The vines at the back of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, at Hourglass, at David Arthur — these are 40, 50, sometimes 60 years old, and they produce grapes with a concentration and complexity that young vines simply cannot match. Look for “old vines” on the label.
The Practical Approach
Go to the small producers. They don’t advertise as much, they don’t have the big tasting rooms, and they’re not on the wine shuttle tours that most visitors follow. They do have better wine and more interesting stories.
The Yountville tasting room corridor — along Washington Street in Yountville — has more options than you can reasonably visit. Walk it on a week morning, taste at three or four places, buy what you like, skip the rest.
