Wine Chronicle: What Happened to Cabernet?
By Dan Berger
Article Thumbnail: This article explores the evolution of California cabernet sauvignon, focusing on how modern production and consumer trends have shifted the wine away from its traditionally age-worthy, aromatic character. Dan Berger argues that most cabernets are now made for immediate consumption, with high alcohol, sweetened profiles and diminished complexity. He critiques the role of wine critics, consumer habits and industry practices — including the use of additives such as Mega Purple — for accelerating this “mediocratization.” The piece also reflects on the decline of wine education and the impact of health narratives on public perception. Berger ultimately questions whether today's wine culture can rediscover cabernet’s deeper potential.
NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — The phrase “cabernet sauvignon” is a designation that means much to most Americans, especially those who buy red wines regularly and expect that a cab will be better than almost any other red wine.
In the last few decades, an increasing number of U.S. wine-buyers have consumed it relatively young. A rapidly declining number of cab-buyers stash it in a wine cellar or other cool location so it will improve in the bottle – one of its greatest attributes when it is made to do so.
Because so much cabernet is consumed young, most California winemakers have taken to making it so that aging it isn’t vital or even recommended – so it can be enjoyed very early and primarily by newcomers. Some people believe that one of cabernet’s greatest attributes is its ability to deliver superb mature character with a bit of time in the bottle.
(Two longtime winemakers, in separate conversations I had with them, told me that two important U.S. wine critics admitted to them that they didn’t understand or appreciate older red wines. One winemaker said of one critic, “He told me he likes them young, so that’s probably the best way to make them.” Of the second critic, another winemaker told me, “He likes fruit and oak. I don’t think he cares whether a wine ages or not.”)
All that is needed to make such a drink-now wine is a lot of fresh fruit, preferably picked when it is very ripe. Complexity based on slow maturation is disparaged, so it has become unnecessary.
One trait of modern cabernet-buyers, which is notably visible in restaurants, is that most seem not at all interested in smelling the wine. From what I have observed, a cabernet’s aroma is almost never an important issue with most of today’s cab drinkers.
I see this often when I dine out and observe how people treat cabernet at nearby tables. A typical scenario: A patron orders a cabernet or a cabernet-based red wine. The server pulls the cork and serves it around the table. It’s rare when I see anyone swirl the glass and sniff. The person who ordered the wine usually does, but almost everyone else simply takes sips. No swirl, no sniff.
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This is also evident in the way cabernet is portrayed on television. On the NBC series “Law and Order, Special Victims Unit,” the character Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay, occasionally concludes an episode by winding down in an upscale restaurant, where she orders “a cabernet,” a “sophisticated” choice. I have never seen her swirl the glass and take a sniff.
(Nor does the character ask the bartender who made the cabernet. The show’s writers seem to believe that cabernet is fine without food – as if all cabernets are created to be consumed like a stand-alone cocktail.)
By portraying someone ordering a cabernet and not sniffing it implies that the writers believe cabernet is equivalent to cola, a thirst-quencher more than a multilevel experience. Yet almost every winemaker and wine collector I know says that the aroma of any fine wine is 75% of the wine experience.
As mentioned here last week, a lack of wine sophistication among a broad swath of Americans is not a new idea. It goes back decades to when Leon D. Adams, one of the founders of California’s Wine Institute and an author and California wine historian, produced several lifestyle pamphlets for the institute’s campaign to educate Americans in the ways of wine.
Adams’ brochures addressed topics such as cooking with wine, wine on the family dinner table, wine in moderation and other basic subjects. The pamphlets were widely disseminated nationally through the 1970s and 1980s. About 1990 the Wine Institute seemed to abandon the entire concept of wine education.
I spoke to a member of the Wine Institute last week. He had never heard of Leon Adams and knew nothing of his wine/lifestyle pamphlets. But he did say that, although the institute has been primarily a lobbying organization on behalf of California wine for the last several decades, institute members recently discussed increasing lifestyle education in the near future.
Another post-Prohibition promoter of wine in moderation was Dr. Salvatore Lucia, a San Francisco-area physician who published several books on wine in moderation as healthful, including, “A History of Wine as Therapy,” (J.B. Lippincott, 1963).
One of the problems with mentioning wine’s effects on the human body, even when moderation is emphasized, was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ rigid mandate that no one involved in the wine industry could make any health claims about wine’s use. The penalty was a loss of a business license. In some cases, wineries were even prohibited from encouraging people to buy a bottle of wine. A result has been a significant dampening effect on the desire of most Americans to learn anything about wine’s history or historic use.
Rob McMillan, principal brand strategist for wine at Silicon Valley Bank, has for more than a decade done careful wine-industry analysis involving sales, pricing and health issues. In a recent website posting on the website The Buyer he wrote:
“Today, the anti-alcohol industry and the World Health Organization has pushed the inflated narrative that alcohol, including wine, is a causal factor in over 200 illnesses and contributes to over 3 million deaths each year. That message is not settled science but is taking hold with health-conscious consumers.”
He also commented about numerous wineries’ efforts to de-alcoholize many different kinds of wine. McMillan says, “The heat applied during the de-alcoholizing process changes the flavor profiles so that only the evangelists truly love the product. No sane producer will take a well-made Pinot Noir that could sell for $40 and demean the product by taking out the alcohol.”
Moreover, every effort to lower the alcohol in today’s cabernets that I have tasted is usually bland and nowhere near what a wine-lover would appreciate in a dry wine. I have tasted successful white wines at 6% and 7% alcohol that are appealing, but I believe the best way to lower the alcohol in cabernet is using traditional methods such as earlier harvesting when it is feasible. However, that risks making a cabernet with a little too much herbal character for today’s market.
Some high-tech machines have been developed that can lower alcohols, but I don’t know of any California winery that is doing so successfully.
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Understanding Cabernet
Cabernet is widely misunderstood by most consumers, partly because so many wineries today make it in a style that has little to do with the way classic cabernet smells or tastes. Many cabernets today are made similar to the way sauvignon blanc has been “blanded” (as discussed here last week).
Part of this relates to much higher alcohols in some wines. Over the years, I have randomly tested some of the most expensive wines in California and have found that even though the labels say the wines have less than 15% alcohol, several of them have lab-tested significantly higher. In one test conducted by a friend and winemaker, six of seven wines he tested came out with more than 17% alcohol.
In theory, these wines would be technically out of compliance with federal regulations. In recent years, I have noticed a growing tendency toward making cabernets that are either low in acidity or extremely sweet, or both. I’m not sure how wineries are doing this, but I have been told by credible sources that at least one major iconic Napa Valley winery uses significant amounts of Mega Purple to sweeten its expensive cabernet.
Although Mega Purple is theoretically a color-enhancer for red wines, it can also boost the impression of richness and sweetness.
Writer Emily Bell, in the website Vine Pair, said of Mega Purple:
“Beyond enriching the color, Mega Purple is thought to add ‘roundness’ and boost the fruit or residual sugar of a wine that may have come out with less than desirable body. Winemakers also use Mega Purple to cover up the flavor of pyrazines, the compounds that give an unmistakable green bell-pepper flavor to certain wines. While not always undesirable and generally well-suited for aging, vegetal flavors are a much harder sell than big, fruity wines that promise to taste like a tannic blackberry explosion at 14.5 percent alcohol.”
She added that inexpensive wines “rely on Mega Purple to create their generic, fruit-forward, softer reds, (but) smaller wineries making more expensive wines supposedly use Mega Purple, too… (So) … we can’t really judge the impact, since we don’t know who’s doing what with Mega Purple and how much of it they’re adding…”
She said that Mega Purple “is probably used in darker wines where big fat fruit and richer colors are desirable.”
I have done much analysis of Mega Purple at various dosing levels. It can change the way the wine smells and tastes. And in a classic cabernet, especially when it comes from a singular estate property, I imagine it could mask some of the unique characteristics that consumers expect.
Shifting Cabernet’s Aromas and Flavors
The style of most California cabernet has shifted since about 1997 toward more intensity both in aroma and flavor, and alcohols have risen. The cabernets I cut my teeth on almost always displayed subtle green-herb elements, which seem to be despised by many reviewers who rank such wines with low scores.
Yet it is that very same characteristic of dried herbs, tea leaves, tobacco and similar traits that are essential if the wine is going to develop the personality I saw last week, when we celebrated the 44th birthday of one of my sons by opening a 1981 Newton Cabernet. It displayed remarkable staying power with just a trace of the herbal components. The fruit of slightly dried black cherry was enhanced by a trace of mint. After 20 minutes, the wine had transmogrified into a more complex aroma of sagebrush, a trace of green tea and fresh olives.
This is exactly what I had hoped for when I put this wine in my 60-degree wine cellar nearly four decades ago, to sit alongside another two dozen 1981 cabernets, none of which has ever failed to deliver amazing complexity. That’s the way cabernet used to be made throughout Napa. One reason this wine was so fascinating was that it went perfectly with tri-tip and smoked salmon – as it was originally intended.
Today’s cabernets, for the most part, are picked much later and typically have less acid structure. And though today’s modern cabs have loads of intensity, I view most as particularly simple. The usual huge concentrated fruit combined with a significant slug of French oak is initially fascinating, but the wines often have insufficient acidity, and the aftertaste is almost syrupy.
As I have previously stated, there is nothing wrong with this style of wine if people like this sort of thing. But aging them is dependent on many other issues, and I am relatively certain that most of these wines will not develop the characteristics that lower-alcohol, earlier-harvested, better-balanced cabernet will deliver.
The question I asked myself was, “Will the vast numbers of Americans who now buy cabernet ever really understand a more structured version?” And I began dealing with it on at least three levels:
Making wines that have varietal accuracy and also some potential to age but still appeal to people who drink them young.
The knee-jerk reaction most Americans have to the phrase “cabernet sauvignon” if the primary grapes begin to change.
Dealing with a later-harvested grape as vineyard temperatures continue to increase into the future.
Upcoming will be a seat-of-the-pants analysis of these three issues and perhaps a few more that might also impact the kinds of cabernets that we will all be looking at in the years ahead – not all that far down the road. The worldwide wine industry must change. Today, at a time when very little wine is being sold in either retail or restaurant settings, it is appropriate for the wine industry to take a severe analysis of where it is, what it is doing, why it is doing it and how to fix the problems that we can control.
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Dan Berger has been writing about wine since 1975.
Wine Discovery:
2022 Mayacamas Merlot, Mount Veeder ($75) – It is always a treat when a relatively expensive red wine delivers exactly what you expect it to and not only in a way that justifies the expenditure but also lives up to the history of the property. This is just such a wine, which reflects one of Napa Valley’s premier estates – and which displays its characteristic estate persona. From the website: “High on the slopes of Mount Veeder, Mayacamas Vineyards has been a source of legendary California wine since 1889. Since the 1950s the vinification and élevage of Mayacamas remains remarkably consistent and our continued commitment to employ classical techniques and tools is integral to the character of these wines.
The mountain terroir at Mayacamas ranges from 1,800 to 2,400 feet in elevation and the estate spans 475 acres, only 50 of which are dedicated to vine. The region’s richly intense, age-worthy wines reflect the independent spirit of its mountain growers and vintners, born of rugged conditions that demand craftsmanship at the highest level.” As much as I continue to adore the cabernets from this project, I believe it is the merlot that delivers so much of the persona of the site. The wine is 76% merlot, but the precision and relative silkiness of its dark fruit core is as much a reflection of its 24% cabernet franc. There are plenty of tannins here, so the wine is clearly set up for aging of at least 15 years, becoming more complex along the way. But this is a true classic in the Old World sense, and the wine has so much personality today that it is a delight to consume soon if it is decanted. From the site: “The 2022 Merlot initiates the palate with a great deal of immediate appeal as it is soft and elegant. Engaging aromatics of lilac and lavender on the nose. Red and dark berry fruit permeates the front of the palate with generosity followed by a mid-palate structure with savory tones of tobacco, anise, and cedar. Lingering and long on the back palate.” — Dan Berger.
Today’s Polls:
This Week's Word Challenge Reveal:
The correct answer is C: "Browning from heat and sugars."
"Maillardization" refers to the Maillard reaction — a chemical process between amino acids and sugars that occurs with heat, producing browning and complex aromas. While most familiar in seared foods and coffee-roasting, similar reactions influence wine flavor, particularly through barrel toasting or oxidative aging. These subtle layers contribute to the savory, roasted or nutty notes prized in well-aged or classically styled wines.
Named after French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard, who first described the reaction in 1912, the term entered scientific vocabulary in the mid-20th century. While rare in wine discourse, it’s increasingly relevant as winemakers experiment with oxidative styles and high-temperature techniques — showing that some of wine’s magic comes not just from grapes but from chemistry.
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