Treasury Wine Estates sets the standard for Californian 2013 vintage

The 2013 Californian wine harvest is set to be "truly outstanding" if a review of some of the premium vineyards of Treasury Wine Estates by Harpers.co.uk is replicated across the state. Geoffrey Dean reports from the Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

If David Dearie's shock sacking as Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) chief executive last month was indeed connected to the $160m writedown the company's US division suffered earlier this year, its stable of Californian wineries continues to produce premium wine that keep turning heads. One hopes that irony will not be lost on Dearie's long-term successor, for while the Australian conglomerate's US business has seen reduced volume, revenue and earnings since 2008, Harpers was given a rare insight into the exceptional quality of winemakers, viticulturalists and vineyards at TWE's disposal on a harvest visit to California. Gratifyingly, the 2013 vintage in the state looks like being a truly outstanding one.

While Beringer and Chateau St. Jean are the two main pillars in TWE's portfolio, each renowned as big volume producers but also offering some world-class premium wines , the medium-scale Stags' Leap and boutique producer Etude complete a formidable quartet. The latter two, under the respective technical direction of Christophe Paubert, a Bordelais, and Jon Priest, an American, are crafting beautifully balanced wines that have a real sense of place. Full of Californian sunshine, they nevertheless have elegance and wonderfully integrated tannins. Paubert's cabernet sauvignon and petite sirah varietal wines are Napa classics, while Priest's chardonnay and pinot noir are beguiling cool climate wines from Carneros. More on them later, but ladies first.

Laurie Hook, of Beringer, and Margo van Staaveren, of Chateau St. Jean, are two highly experienced chief winemakers. Hook, whose main focus is on Beringer's premium wines rather than the commercial ones that dominate its 95-million bottle annual production, admits she is "definitely pulling back on the amount of new oak" she uses. Her new Luminus chardonnay is a good example, the outstanding 2012, which becomes available in the UK next year, being aged in 20% new oak.

Beringer have long been renowned for their Private Reserve Cabernets, which age extremely well, as was clear from a vertical tasting of the 1980, the sublime 1991 and the excellent 2010 (which is released in Europe on Jan 1). All three came from cooler vintages, with the well-balanced 2010 carrying its 14.6% abv with ease, its rich St Helena-dominated fruit effortlessly absorbing the 93% new oak.

Balance, very much a watchword of Hook's, is something she seems to bring off with all her top wines, and the trade awaits with interest Beringer's new 'Icon' cabernet, whose first vintage was last year and is still in barrel. Only the very best fruit from selected rows (not necessarily the same each year) from its top seven single vineyards in the Napa Valley goes into the Icon, of which only 200 cases are made each year.

Hook thinks the 2013 could be the best cabernet she has ever made. "We've never seen colours like we have in this vintage, so it's definitely in the running right now," she told Harpers. "The wines are just so inky with so many anthocyanins, which mean you can extract more tannin. They'll also form larger compounds that will give greater mouthfeel and density."

*The Rhine House, centrepiece of the Beringer estate*

Beringer's capability to produce some of the best cabernet in Napa is likely to be enhanced with the planting early next year of a new 22-acre block right next door to Screaming Eagle's vineyards. With land at such a premium in the valley, such large-scale plantings are extremely rare. The site has 'fantastic soil for cabernet' according to Beringer's viticulturalist, Will Drayton, an Englishman who was one of the leading graduates from UC Davis in California.

"We conducted 15 soil pits and really did our homework on analysis," he said. "There's a reservoir nearby and wells too, so we're not worried about water. Although the block was brush with lots of rock and a load of poison oak trees, we'd been eyeing it up for some time. We finally asked the owners if we could lease it off them, and they told us we'd already been doing so for the past 30 years. We never even knew!"

While Hook's single varietal Napa wines - not just cabernet but also merlot from the elevated Bancroft Ranch Vineyard in the Howell Mountain AVA - earn worldwide acclaim, van Staaveren has established a reputation as a master blender. Having done 34 vintages at Chateau St. Jean, she knows every row of her vines, and Harpers was given a tasting of her latest tour de force, the 2010 Cinq Cepages.

Only released in the US at the beginning of October, with worldwide exports commencing early next year, this Sonoma County blend, which comprises 78% cabernet and the other four main Bordeaux varietals, comes from the Alexander, Dry Creek, Knights and Sonoma Valleys. Multi-layered with red and black fruit, as well as some spice from the 12% American oak used, it is powerful at 14.4% abv but nicely balanced by firm acidity and soft but overt tannins. "It's one of the most complex Cinq Cepages I've made," mused van Staaveren.

In the five years since Christophe Paubert has been the winemaker at Stags' Leap, the former Yquem cellarmaster says he has made only a few tweaks. "If it was iconic without me, what's the point of changing," he declared. "I try to show the beauty and identity of the fruit here, not to beat Bordeaux." He has, though, reduced the amount of new oak from 75 to 50% in the latest vintage of the winery's flagship cabernet, The Leap 2010. Very concentrated yet elegant, this has a fine tannin structure with notable length and balance.

This, and Stags' Leap other famous wine, the 'Ne Cede Malis' are released in Europe on Jan 1. The latter, named after the winery founder's family motto ('Don't Give in to Misfortune'), is an extraordinary blend that Paubert modestly says he 'guides' rather than makes. A batch of gobelet vines planted in 1929 produces a wine that is 85% petite syrah (aka durif), with the remaining 15% made up of as many as 16 other varietals, six of which are white. All the grapes are co-fermented before being aged in 100% American oak (a quarter new) for a year only. French barriques could not counter the power of petite sirah and its often ferocious tannins.

Yet, thanks to the very old age of the vines, these tannins are remarkably soft, enabling this spicy, intense melange to be surprisingly approachable now. A dash of viognier gives it a floral lift, while the 14.1% abv (which Paubert promises is correct despite the 1% leeway allowed on American labels) makes you want more than one glass.

A second bottle is definitely what you want when you drink the delectable wines of Etude. This gem of a winery, tucked away in picturesque Los Carneros hills of that are so undulating that Jon Priest, the winemaker, likes to inspect his vines by riding through them on horseback. "I'm closely involved with the viticulture here," Priest said. "We obsess over tannins here and the tannin quality starts in the vineyard. Being able to bring out the tannin in the right way is essential to winemaking."

Thanks to this almost art-form tannin management, Etude's pinot noir feels like liquid silk. Very low-yielding vines, a plethora of clones, many of them rare, multiple soil types and the marine influence from nearby San Pablo Bay all combine to produce gloriously concentrated fruit. Etude's 'Heirloom' is as good as Californian pinot gets, and it is very good indeed.

Their cabernet, sourced from Napa Valley benchland fruit, is also outstanding, as is the vibrant chardonnay, which sees no new oak and minimal malolactic fermentation. "Our style is to be less artefact and more about the grapes," Priest concluded. It is a mantra that is shared by all four of TWE's gifted quartet of Californian winemakers, who continue to raise the quality of their many labels.

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