Where have all the honest Cabs gone?

THE wine was a youthful reddish purple, with aromas of cassis and red raspberry, a plush mid-palate and a rich finish of dark chocolaty oak. It was, in its way, delicious -- and it made absolutely no impression. There were no rough edges, no distinguishing terroir flavors, little food-friendly acid and no Cabernet “grip” from tannin. It was about as challenging as a kitten or a chocolate-covered cherry. That bottle of 2004 St. Helena Winery “Sauvage” Napa Valley Cabernet seemed to embody everything that’s wrong with many California Cabs these days.

Indeed, sommeliers, retailers and critics have become increasingly dismissive of California Cabernets, which often seem generic, confectionary, overblown or gutless. In a recent issue of the International Wine Cellar, critic Stephen Tanzer wrote of their “freakishly high alcohol, port like ripeness and strong oakiness.” Even Robert Parker, whose penchant for “blockbuster” Cabs may have instigated this trend for bigger, blowzier wines, seems to have had enough. In a recent issue of the Wine Advocate, he derided many of the $50 to $100 Cabs he’d tasted recently as “vapid, overly-oaked, devoid of any real charm, texture or fruit.”

This alarming trend is enough to make one question the future direction of California’s flagship variety. In a world where sweet fruit and buxom textures can taste and feel like so much surgical enhancement, is there an honest wine among them?

In fact, there are still plenty of honest wines out there -- terrific, generous Cabs that nevertheless have structure, a fine balance of firm tannin and bracing, meal-friendly acid. Some have been hiding in plain sight in the Napa Valley, still California’s greatest source for Cabernet. Others come from nearby mountains and valleys in Sonoma County or even the Santa Cruz Mountains. These wines may seem relatively unadorned compared with flashier counterparts, but they’re worth revisiting or discovering.

They don’t come cheap -- for most, you’ll pay between $50 and $100, though there are a few good ones from $20 to $40.

If you can’t remember what a good Cabernet tastes like, a bottle of Karl Lawrence Cellars Cab from Napa will remind you. The winery was founded in 1991, but its wines sell out quickly, so it has remained a kind of underground success. Drawn mostly from the famed Morisoli Vineyard near Rutherford, the 2003 is a bold and powerful wine with ample dark fruit, but its driving acids and gripping tannins give it a depth and a length that many of these plumper, richer wines only pretend to possess.

Good, ripe California Cabernet should have more concentration than most other wines, with a texture marked by fine tannins and a vinous flavor that informs the fruit. Sometimes that vinous flavor is an herbal note; sometimes it’s more like dark earthy spice. It’s a quality that the place where the grapes are grown will contribute, a terroir element that will typically go missing when that fruit is too ripe or raisined, or when it has been aged in heavily toasted new oak barrels. Karl Lawrence assiduously avoids that mistake.

The wine is made by Michael Karl Trujillo, who was lucky to have had the late Andre Tchelistcheff, one of Napa’s winemaking legends, as a mentor -- the two worked together at Sequoia Grove, where Tchelistcheff consulted, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. “He used to say that you could make any wine great if you focused on the balance,” says Trujillo. “Acidity is something I believe in. I want my wines to be just sweet and firm enough to enjoy on release, but I want them to last five or 10 or 20 years.”

Another relative newcomer whose wines buck the trend is Neal Family Vineyards, which started full-scale production in 2001. Mark Neal can’t really help but suffuse his family’s wines with terroir. His father Jack Neal founded one of the Napa Valley’s first vineyard management companies in 1968, and that company still farms nearly 2,000 acres of vineyards, from Coombsville to Calistoga. Neal Family winemaker Gove Celio makes eight vineyard-designated wines; his Napa Valley Cabernet is succulent, generous and completely on point, a rich wine possessing fine, pristine tannins to give the wine grip and precision.

You can still find Karl Lawrence Cellars Cabernet and Neal Family Napa Valley Cabernet in a few retail shops here, but like the “cult” Cabernets with which they’re sometimes compared, these wines are made in fairly small quantities, so they can be hard to come by.

Many of the wineries that made Napa famous are still making terrific wines; these old-school Cabs are being grown and made with a kind of four-square honesty that serves to remind you what Cabernets used to taste like before they went over the top. They may not be as plush or as seductively sweet as the new breed, but in many cases they’re as good as they’ve ever been, and are often better with food than their more overblown counterparts. Their prices, too, aren’t as overblown.

Take some time to revisit the wines of Sequoia Grove (which Trujillo also makes), Frog’s Leap’s organically grown Cabernet and the well-priced wines from Honig. As for old school, you can’t get much older than Robert Mondavi Winery, whose Napa Valley Cabernet is every bit as reliable and balanced as it’s been since 1966; the 2003 is widely available for less than $25.

A tactile, ‘dusty’ quality

ALL these wines hail from Rutherford and Oakville, the heart of the Napa Valley, in many ways the clearest expression of Napa we have. The valley floor is also home to many high-priced, super-premium wines, but the more reliable producers there, such as Groth, Paradigm and Rubicon Estate still produce wines with a tactile, characteristic “dusty” quality to the tannins that will again remind you that Napa, too, can foster a sense of place.

For the most powerful California Cabs, though, you’ll want to hit the slopes. The Napa Valley is lined by the Mayacamas and Vaca ranges, providing hillside vineyard land at high elevations with poor soils (a good thing for wine) and intense growing conditions that lend an earth or mineral character to the wines, a terroir imprint that shows through even at big ripeness levels.

It’s hard to generalize across 30 miles of topographical dips, inclines and expositions on two different mountainous spines, but each range carries its own broad set of attributes. Cabernets on the Mayacamas side, from Marston Family Vineyard on Spring Mountain, Chateau Potelle on Mount Veeder, Long Meadow Ranch on Mount St. John and the Diamond Mountain wines of J. Davies and Von Strasser all possess a particularly volcanic, granite minerality in their tannins that gird the wines’ structure and amplify their power. Across the valley in the Vaca range, the wines from Howell Mountain above Calistoga tend to have a darker, more soil-like black earth character, as expressed in wines from Ladera, Lokoya and Robert Craig Wine Cellars.

Napa may be ground zero for Cabernet in California, but it’s not the only place in the state where great Cabernet is grown and made. The Alexander Valley has long been the source for such classic Cabs as Simi, Jordan and Silver Oak; it’s also a hotbed of new vineyard development. Recently Kendall-Jackson planted impressive new vineyards whose fruit finds its way into a number of bottlings, most notably the Hawkeye Mountain Cabernet from its Highland Estates program. Another well-known old-school winery, Ferrari-Carano, recently released two darkly beautiful Cabernet blends from newly developed vineyards there, bottled under a label called PreVail and crafted by Napa wine consultant Philippe Melka.

The Cabernets of Sonoma Mountain might be the most Napa-like of any Sonoma-based fruit. They’re often marvelous, such as those produced from Monte Rosso Vineyard, one of Sonoma’s oldest, for years owned by one of its oldest wineries, Louis M. Martini (Martini is now owned by E. & J. Gallo Winery). And for nearly two decades, Patrick Campbell at Laurel Glen has produced fiercely minerally, powerful wines of profound depth, made with consistency and grace.

The redwood-forested Santa Cruz Mountains AVA (American Viticultural Area) in the southern part of the Bay Area is much less well known for Cabernet than is Napa. And yet one of California’s greatest wines -- the Monte Bello Cabernet blend from Ridge, made by Paul Draper -- is produced entirely from fruit grown on this out-of-the-way coastal range.

Monte Bello and Ridge’s more affordable Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet are consistently some of my favorite reds. Draper’s 2000 Monte Bello was chosen as the best among some of the world’s most revered California and Bordeaux wines in the reenactment of the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting held last summer in Napa and London, and his 1971 also took top honors among all the older wines in the tasting.

Monte Bello is attractively lean, with shimmering acids that give the fruit lift and contour -- a far cry from all those blowzy, super-ripe Cabs. There’s plenty of dark plum and black fig fruit, but that fruit resides within the context of other Cabernet attributes, a vinous earthy core that reminds us that this stuff comes from a vine, and from the earth.

Monte Bello could well serve as a touchstone for California Cabernet. Producers of overblown, over-the-top Cabs should be required to open a bottle, pour a glass, swirl it, take in the aromas and taste, and remember what California Cabernet is supposed to be.

food@latimes.com

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Top California Cabernets

HERE’S a sampling of Cabernets in the market that in my estimation give off a strong, honest sense of Cabernet in the glass, and do so with some balance and restraint:

2004 Honig Napa Valley Cabernet. A youthful wine with a supple core. Rutherford dust comes through deep, plummy fruit, all supported by a cushion of oak. The fruit is balanced, generous but hardly sweet or out of bounds. It finishes with toasty oak notes and good grip. A classic. Widely available at fine wine shops, about $30.

2003 J. Davies Diamond Mountain District Cabernet. From the Davies family that has made Schramsberg sparkling wines for years, this new wine is a dark, sumptuous red with plenty of generous fruit and ample textures. Plenty of rich California fruit flavors, but they’re nicely grounded by fine gripping tannins. Available at Duke of Bourbon in Canoga Park, (818) 341-1234; Red Carpet Wine Merchants in Glendale, (800) 339-0609; and Manhattan Fine Wines in Manhattan Beach, (310) 374-3454, about $60.

2003 Karl Lawrence Napa Valley Cabernet. Dark and plummy when first poured, with scents of red earth and a mildly herbal note, it’s surprisingly juicy, fresh and lifted on the palate. Its dark plum and cassis fruit is so fresh and fruit-forward you almost don’t notice the intense structure supporting it, then it’s chewy and dense, with flavors of cedar and dust and a long finish. Available at Twenty Twenty Wine Merchants in West Los Angeles, (310) 447-2020; Woodland Hills Wine Co. in Woodland Hills, (818) 222-1111; and Wine House in West Los Angeles, (310) 479-3731, about $55.

2003 Ladera Napa Valley Howell Mountain Cabernet. A deeply set, beautifully reserved dark wine, with aromas of black cherry peeking out from behind more dense, dark, earthy scents and marked by a pretty cedar aroma from the oak. Its flavors are austere at first (it’s best to decant), but with air it gets creamier, its black cherry flavors get a little brighter, and the wine takes on a leafy vinousness that finishes with plenty of grip from dark, dusty tannins. Available at Manhattan Fine Wines, Woodland Hills Wine Co. and Twenty Twenty Wine Merchants, about $60.

2003 Long Meadow Ranch Napa Valley Cabernet. A food wine through and through, with scents of black cherries and bay leaves. The dark red cherry flavors are supported by hints of olive and a mineral grounding; there’s a dusting of cocoa in the finish. The olive and herbal notes make it a great wine for lamb. Available at Wine House and Woodland Hills Wine Co., about $40.

2003 Marston Family Vineyard Spring Mountain District Cabernet Sauvignon. Beautiful dark fruit and spice aromas, like blackberries scented with anise. The wine is dark and powerful on the palate, with plenty of spicy oak and a lovely, dark tannic grip on the finish. Available at Wine House and Hi-Time Wine Cellars in Costa Mesa, (949) 650-8463, about $80.

2003 Neal Family Napa Valley Cabernet. A wine that serves up fruit and vinous, herbal notes in equal measure. It leads with pretty olive and cassis scents, with a touch of cedar. Fine tannins, a solid weight, taut acids, a firm texture and a lovely finish. Available at John & Pete’s in West Hollywood, (310) 657-3080; Flask Fine Wines in Studio City, (818) 761-5373; and Woodland Hills Wine Co., about $50.

2003 Ridge Vineyards Santa Cruz Mountains Monte Bello . Initial scents are of pine fronds and cassis, with an earthy tinge grounding the scent. The flavors are darker and warmer, blackberry compote and warm dried fig, with an earthbound mineral component girding the wine and supporting the fruit. That minerality and the wine’s shimmering acidity make it feel lean, light-footed and detailed, with a finish of grace and precision. Still very youthful, it will benefit from years in the cellar. Available at Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese in Los Angeles, (323) 856-8699; Topline Wine & Spirits in Glendale, (818) 500-9670; Wally’s Wine & Spirits in Los Angeles, (310) 475-0606; and Woodland Hills Wine Co., about $120.

2004 Von Strasser Diamond Mountain District Cabernet. This wine leads with scents of cedar, black cherry and dark plum (a classic mountain fruit profile), accented by notes of cedar. Its flavors are big and generous, but reined in, with a mouth-feel that’s taut and controlled and a darkly mineral finish. Still very young for a mountain wine; best to decant. Available at Woodland Hills Wine Co. and Wally’s Wine & Spirits, about $50.

-- Patrick Comiskey