Usually Steve and I have to hoof it to Napa every year to taste the newest vintage of Cabernet Sauvignons from barrel.  But this year the California Cabernet Society brought their annual gig to San Fran, and to the Financial District none the less.  Quick flight in, catch the BART, drop off at the Embarcadero, and there we were, great restaurants, The Ferry Building and a potentially topical tasting all within 10 minutes walk.  Gotta love SF.

After a quick lunch at One Market (good grub, I didn’t even know it was a Michelin One Star) we headed over to the tasting.  As some of you may have heard, the 2008 growing season was a strange one, lots of problems early with perhaps the worst frost in the last 30 years hitting many parts of the valley. From our discussions with many growers, if you were down only 30% you should consider yourself “lucky” (some luck!).  But if there was a silver lining to the frost it was that crop levels were naturally halved, meaning the remaining fruit had the potential to achieve perfect ripeness if the rest of the season complied.  And, of course, it didn’t.  The weather was wacky, with several heat spikes during the season, throwing the vines into further confusion.

But when all was said and done, most growers were quite happy with what they ended up with.  As we like to say, “five bottles of the greatest wine I’ve ever made”.  But our tastings indicated that that may not generally be the case.  It’s not a uniformly excellent vintage, though it appears that the mountain zones fared better than the flats.  We had many impressive wines from both Howell and Spring Mountains.  There were also some definite surprises in the pack, with a couple of names that tend to not appear at the top of the list hitting it out of the park, at least with the samples that they provided to us.

But enough already, here are the hits:

Barnett, BV (first wine made in the new winery), Buoncristiani, Carter (in particular their hillside Coliseum Block), Hall (from one of their Veeder blocks if memory serves),  Keenan, Piña, Sherwin Family, Sullivan (perhaps the winner, shockingly good), Titus, Viader and Vineyard 7&8.

This leaves out a bunch of wines that just didn’t bring their “A” game, especially when they had a shot at wowing us with vineyard block selections, best barrels, etc.  This was not like tasting the 91′s, 94′s, 97′s, and so on, where everything in the room was uniform in quality (for the most part), there were stylistic shifts all over the place, with only the mountain wines showing a level of concentration and intensity of fruit that could be considered uniform in its higher quality.  Ninety wineries presented, we got to about 70 of them,  with about a dozen of them really standing out from that group.

There will be some hits for sure.  But a successful vintage from top to bottom?  We can’t say that right now with any certainty at all.  We’re thinking perhaps 2002-ish for the top wines, the best being quite fleshy and very “front to back” in their demeanor.  A good vintage? Yes.  A great one? Wait and see.

After the gig we did a quick commando pub run, hitting Perbacco, Hog Island Oyster Company ($1 Sweetwater oysters on Mondays from 5-7!) and Spring Roll takeout at Slanted Door before jumping the BART back to the OC in time to catch the 4th quarter of the Lakers game.  Just another day at the office…