New Napa Valley Wines Highlight Harmony and Refinement with 2018 Vintage

The 2018 vintage is yet another example of Napa Valley making much more balanced and refined wines that highlight a new drinkability for America’s most famous wine region. It could even prove to be a new benchmark for Napa Valley reds.

I tasted nearly 1,100 wines from Napa and Sonoma over the last two months with about half from the 2018 vintage. The year produced hundreds of polished and beautiful wines with fantastic aromatics and complexity as well as ultra-fine tannins.

To see exactly how Napa Valley is now making more balanced and drinkable wines compared to just a few years ago, try a bottle of recently released 2018 cabernet sauvignon. You will revel in the balance and character of most of these wines. Many are beautiful to taste now, even drink, but they have the harmony and structure to age.

I am not saying that the 2018 vintage is the best ever for Napa. The 2016 and 2013, for example, are better structured and will last longer. The 2017 and 2015 also may be more consistent in quality despite their hefty wines with the hot growing seasons. There are questions too about the 2020 vintage, which was devastated by the fire; many wineries made no wine. But the pure harmony and unprecedented balance in the well-made 2018s, both red and white, are very special and it’s hard to think of a better vintage for those looking for finesse and refinement in their young wines from Napa.

“It was a great season overall,” said Benoit Touquette of Realm Cellars, who made some of the best wines of his career in 2018. “It was pretty easy to manage and when you think about the picking it was very forgiving and you could pick at your leisure.”

This long and even growing season certainly made some terrific wines. What is striking about the young wines of 2018, both red and white, is their fragrant and diverse character on the nose and their polished and refined tannins as well as pure and complex flavors on the palate. So many wines have much more than just fruit flavors and delve deeply into a more earth driven sensation of dry and wet soil to bark and mushrooms.

Another attractive quality of the vintage is that sub-regions come through clearly in most wines. The reds from Pritchard Hill show the blue fruits and forest floor characters one might expect in the wines, while Rutherford shows the riper, more red fruit with dusty dry earth undertones often associated with the area. It’s just the same with chardonnay whether the whites are from Carneros or farther up the valley.

“For me it's one of my favorite vintages," said Rebekah Wineburg, head winemaker at Quintessa, which may have made its greatest wine ever in 2018. “It was one of my favorite harvests, and at Quintessa with all the diversity we have, where we have different soil types, different elevations, different aspects, it was a vintage where every single one of those different sub-terroirs let us know what they needed. We had time to listen to them.”

All of the above character and nature of the 2018s can be attributed to the relatively long and even grape-growing season. “Everything was delayed,” said Helene Mingot, winemaker and vineyard manager of Eisele Vineyard in Napa Valley. “It gave us time to breathe. Everything was done in its own time. It was very satisfactory as a technician. We had time to do everything that we needed to. The vineyards were well manicured.” 

Mingot also highly praised the 2019 vintage and made a fabulous sauvignon blanc, which is releasing now. “2019 was ideal because of the winter and spring conditions. 2018 and 2019 summer and fall were fairly mild so both years were good years because we had the time to do a lot of segmentation in the vineyard and do what we had to do at the right time.”

Global winemaker Paul Hobbs, who is based in Sonoma but makes great wines in Napa added: “2019 will be even more refined [than 2018] with better purity and better precision. It will be the best of the decade. The 2019s are sensational.”

Hobbs noted that the only problem with 2018 was that many vineyards had too much crop and unless they were crop thinned regularly, winemakers may have had too many grapes. This could have led to slightly diluted or hollow wines in the end, which was proven by my tastings, so far.

“It was a bumper crop in 2018,” he said. “Two vintages in one. I have never seen in my 40 years a vintage with that much crop. We put more than 60%, and in some cases 70%, of the crop on the ground, and we still got normal yields. It was insane.”

The best wines in 2018 so far obviously came from super manicured vineyards. The winemakers wanted to make their best wines possible and weren’t tempted, like some, to harvest slightly more grapes to make up for a short crop in 2017 or for back blending into the same vintage. So far, my top wines have come from such names as Schrader, Aubert, Alpha Omega, Eisele Vineyards, Dalla Valle, David Arthur, Paul Hobbs, Peter Michael Winery, Quintessa, Realm, Sloan, Shafer Vineyards, and Tor.

A new and exciting wine in my tasting was a joint venture between Napa’s Dalla Valle and Tuscany’s Ornellaia. The cabernet sauvignon-blend, 2018 DVO Napa Valley, is produced at the Dalla Valle winery with grapes purchased mostly from mountain vineyards around the valley with some valley floor fruit to give the wine more richness in the center palate. The wine shows a wonderful tension and poise for a first release of a few hundred cases. A Zoom video on the project with a conversation with the Dalla Valle’s and Ornellaia is forthcoming.

“We wanted to make something more refined but that remains very Napa Valley,” said Axel Heinz, head winemaker at Ornellaia in a Zoom call with the Dalla Valle’s.

Another interesting wine to note in this report is the second release of Constellation’s To Kalon Vineyard Co. Napa Valley Oakville Highest Beauty 2017. This is made from the best grapes selected by dynamic consulting winemaker Andy Erickson from the conglomerate’s best parcels from the famous To Kalon. Although it’s not at the stellar level of the first release 2016, it’s an elegant and refined wine for a 2017 and is very attractive now, highlighting the new wave balance of Napa Valley reds.

I also was so impressed with so many wines from the AVA of Stags Leap District. It seems many winemakers are making wines that emphasize the unique character of the appellation instead of just pure and ripe fruit. My favorite was the Realm Cellars Napa Valley Stags Leap District Moonracer 2018. It’s a stunning red with superb complexity on both the nose and palate. It may be my wine of the 2018 vintage in Napa Valley, so far. But I have numerous other wines to taste still.

Chardonnay is another highlight in this report with Aubert and Peter Michael Winery showing the prowess of the white grape in 2018. The wines are more poised and fresher than the same wines produced in 2018. The Aubert Chardonnay Sonoma County Sonoma Coast Lauren Estate 2018 was one of the greatest wines of my Californian tastings so far this year. Its complexity and structure were second to none. It may be the greatest American chardonnay ever produced combining structure and depth with incredible drinkability.

Drinkability and balance seem to be the key words for the best wines of California at the moment, particularly from Napa. And I can’t wait to taste more 2018s and 2019s with the trend for beautiful and harmonized wines shining so brightly in my tastings. “The next stage of winemaking is going to be how to make dense and solid wines but how to also keep a portion of the aromas fresh and subtle and balance it out,” said Jean Hoefliger, winemaker at Alpha Omega, axr and a number of other wineries. “I hope I did my job right in 2018 and 2019 because I am focusing on this a lot.”

He added: “People’s tastes are changing and they are not for juicy sugary and sweet Napa wines. They are for balance. And the response has been good. The wines are much less sexy and much more intellectual."

- James Suckling, editor