The year that broke California wine Our idea of luxury has changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Napa Valley wines reveal how

The year that broke California wine Our idea of luxury has changed dramatically over the last 15 years. Napa Valley wines reveal how

Look around. We live in the age of gilded minimalism. In the Bay Area in the year 2019, pop-ups in unmarked buildings draw hours-long lines. Our hottest restaurants are spare, open temples to natural light. We want our butter house-cultured, our grains ancient, our wild ales spontaneously fermented — and we’re happy to pay the premium markup.

We privilege heterogeneity. We will stalk Instagram for the limited availability of a naturally leavened bagel that is available nowhere else. Our most of-the-moment bars sling natural wines — the cloudier, the funkier, the better. Obscurity reigns. If you haven’t heard of the grape variety (Gringet, anyone?), you probably want the bottle. Even in Napa Valley, where wine trends arrive sluggishly, the most established winemakers have adopted the language of restraint and balance, praising wines that are low in alcohol and high in acidity. Flashy has ceded the stage to subtle.

There are many ways to tell the story of today’s Bay Area — a place that, according to one Washington Post writer, is “rotting” under the pressure of $3,700 average monthly rents, IPO fever and infantries of tech bros in company-branded Patagonia vests. But our food culture, and specifically our wine culture — really, our evolving sense of taste — says so much about who we are today and how we got here.

Actors Paul Giamatti (L) and Thomas Haden Church are shown in a scene from the new film "Sideways" directed by Alexander Payne. The film tells the story of two best friends on a weeklong drive up to 'wine country' in California during which, they explore the nature of their failures and question their relationships. NO SALES REUTERS/Fox Searchlight Pictures/Handout Ran on: 11-15-2004 Good bets: Jamie Foxx in &quo;Ray,&quo; Annette Bening in &quo;Being Julia&quo; and Leonardo DiCaprio in &quo;The Aviator.'' less Actors Paul Giamatti (L) and Thomas Haden Church are shown in a scene from the new film "Sideways" directed by Alexander Payne. The film tells the story of two best friends on a weeklong drive up to 'wine ... more Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close How the year 2004 changed California wine — and California 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Before we could arrive in this era of understated luxury, we had to boomerang off an era of overstated luxury. Remember foie gras? When restaurants looked like nightclubs? When instead of today’s trend of grilling whole animals over open flames, we put food in test tubes? When it was fashionable to show off your affluence, not tastefully hide it? Not so long ago, before we all started drinking pet-nat, San Francisco’s most sought-after wines were all blue-chip Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons — plush, smooth and voluptuous, the vinous equivalent of truffles and caviar.

Looking back at the last two decades, we can find a single inflection point where our idea of luxury began to turn, transforming from the extravagant energy of the early aughts to the spartan style of today.

That point is the year 2004.

2004 was the peak between the dot-com bust of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008. While low interest rates and subprime lending were resulting in an all-time high rate of home ownership in the U.S. — and we know where that went — San Francisco was enthralled by the opening of one blockbuster restaurant after another, most of which, like the economic upswing, would not last long.

2004: A big year for food and wine February: A16 opens in San Francisco. Thomas Keller opens Per Se in New York.

April: Slanted Door moves to Ferry Building.

May: “Mondovino” premieres at Cannes Film Festival.

July: Tartare, Michael Mina and Frisson all open.

July 26: Mumm is the first Napa Valley winery to harvest grapes, in one of the earliest harvests on record.

August: California Supreme Court rules against Bronco Wine Co. in Napa wine labeling case.

September: Heat spike in Napa Valley, with Oakville temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

October: “Sideways” is released in U.S. theaters. Myth opens.

November: Constellation Brands acquires Robert Mondavi Corporation.

December: Diageo acquires Chalone Wine Group.



And though it might not have looked like it at the time, 2004 would turn out to be the most pivotal year in California wine of this millennium. It was the year that the movie “Sideways” premiered and turned a generation into Pinot Noir drinkers. The year that the California Supreme Court told Bronco Wine Co. it couldn’t put “Napa” on the labels of non-Napa wines. The year that California’s two most prominent winery IPOs — Robert Mondavi Winery and the Chalone Wine Group — came crashing down. Having gone public in the ’80s and ’90s, both of these historic wine companies ultimately were seized by larger corporate interests (Constellation and Diageo, respectively) within a two-month period.

Most of all, 2004 was the vintage that finally fulfilled the ideal of ripeness that the California wine industry had been gradually moving toward since the late 1990s. In Napa Valley, winemakers picked grapes at higher sugar levels in 2004 than in any other vintage of the decade: Whereas most years fall closer to 14%, the average ’04 Napa Cabernet would clock in at a whopping 15.3%.

It was that very extremity that catalyzed a monumental shift in Napa Valley wine, forcing a reconsideration of the industry’s identity. Soon, a group of dissenting winemakers would form an influential opposition group, urging a return to leaner, lighter wines. The former wine critic of this newspaper would later write an entire book about the shift away from what he termed “Big Flavor.” Our collective sense of taste would begin to morph. 2004 was the year that took everything too far.

Reviewed now through 20-20 hindsight and news clippings, the story of 2004 reads as a party that was clearly heading for some unsettling demise. “Uncork the Cristal, break out the beluga,” wrote Lauren Weber in Newsday just before Christmas 2004. “It’s bonus time on Wall Street.” In fact, bonuses were up even though Wall Street was down: on track for a 22 percent decline yet handing out $15.9 billion to executives.

You wouldn’t have known anything was down, though, by looking at the food and drink world. In San Francisco, the year saw the opening of major restaurants: Michael Mina (the original, in the Westin St. Francis), Daniel Patterson’s Frisson, George Morrone’s Tartare, Myth, A16. Trader Vic’s opened in the former Stars location; the Slanted Door moved to the high-profile set of the Ferry Building. Thomas Keller expanded beyond the Bay Area that year, opening Bouchon in Las Vegas and Per Se in New York.

The day’s prototypical restaurant was sexy, low-lit and indulgent. Chefs were wooing the “affluent dot-com set with fusion food, fun cocktails and enticing entertainment,” wrote Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer. Food was designed to overwhelm the senses. Reviewing the restaurant Antidote, Bauer described a dish called “oysters croustillant, bonbon and lollipop ($18),” which included peach “caviar” served with a plastic eye dropper of blue vodka.

“It looked,” Bauer wrote in another review, “like ‘Sex and the City’ had signed on for another season in San Francisco.”

Emily Wines, then a sommelier at Fifth Floor and now vice president of wine for Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants, recalls the moment. “The floor was nuts,” she says. “It was really just so driven by blue-chip wines. People drank a ton of Napa Cab. We always had to have some meat with a lot of fat, because the wines people wanted were so tannic.”

2004’s wine programs were all about heavy tomes and classic labels. “Rubicon was the coolest wine list because it was the biggest wine list,” says the Morris owner Paul Einbund, who in 2004 was overseeing the wine program at Tartare. “It was cool just because it had more.”

Much like the molecular food trend, wines in this era embraced the era’s technology. One notorious firm, Enologix, analyzed wines on a micro-chemical level in order to ensure a nearly 100-point score from critics like Robert Parker or James Laube. Globe-trotting winemaker consultants like Michel Rolland were on the rise, which the 2004 documentary “Mondovino” criticized for inflicting homogeneity on all the wine they touched.

This was the peak era for so-called Parkerization, the apex of the critics’ influence. “The alcohols were getting high and some winemakers were really pushing it,” says Kerrin Laz, owner of K. Laz Wine Collection shops, of the mid-aughts. “Critics were really playing a role in some winemaking styles. These wines were getting huge.”

Serendipitously, culture and nature found a perfect synergy in 2004. The vintage’s hot weather and the resulting grapes’ high sugar levels were the ideal conditions for crafting wines that made the critics swoon.

A warm winter jolted the grapevines out of dormancy “earlier than anyone could remember,” says winemaker Cathy Corison. The summer was generally mild, bookended by a heat spike in June and another pivotal one in September, with temperatures reaching 108 degrees in some of Napa’s hottest parts, which “made us scramble to get the grapes in,” Corison says.

“There was a lot of dehydration going on in the grapes,” says Paul Roberts, a master sommelier who was then the Thomas Keller Group’s corporate wine director. That dehydration was a recipe for wines that taste more of jam than of fresh fruit.

The writer Kelli White has posited that 2004 was the extreme manifestation of the lessons Napa winemakers learned from the game-changing 1997 vintage, a warm growing season with high yields and long hang time. “In 1997 the style of Napa really changed,” White says. By nature, not nurture, the 1997 wines were flashier and riper than Napa’s had ever been — and when they were released, three years later, critics declared it the vintage of the century.

Winemakers took note. They put the lessons of ‘97 to use in 2000 and 2001, but when nature handed them such warm weather and sweet grapes in 2004, they put them into overdrive. To her, the vintage’s wines are now “roasted-tasting, very lush, low acid, very boring.”

Yet for all its precedent-setting ripeness, the ’97 Napa Cabs, clocking in at an average 14.6% alcohol, are downright prude compared with 2004’s 15.3%. The ripeness maxim had now been taken to its limit. It had nowhere to go but down.

You can’t go back to Frisson or Tartare. But you can taste 2004 wines. I want to know: How do the wines born of this lavish era stand up to the standards of taste we enforce today? Have they aged better than the eyedroppers of blue vodka?

So I assemble my own collection of wines and enlist three of 2004 San Francisco’s top sommeliers to help me taste: Paul Einbund, Emily Wines and Christie Dufault, who was then at Gary Danko and now teaches at the Culinary Institute of America. We gather in The Chronicle newsroom to uncork 33 bottles of 2004 Napa Valley Cabernets, all disguised inside brown paper bags.

Right off the bat, Einbund — a master of comic cynicism when it comes to wine — is not impressed. “This wine tastes like the cocktail scene in Chicago,” he says of one Cab. “Too sweet.”

The Ladera Lone Canyon Vineyard Cabernet inspires debate. Dufault, the most generous of our group, likes its black pepper aroma, which adds interest to the otherwise plush fruit. “Tastes really expensive,” comments Wines, who splits the difference.

“Since I’m going to be the resident poo-poo head,” Einbund interjects about the Ladera, “OK. This wine is really really good. Everything’s there. It’s pleasurable. But could I drink even a full glass of it? And if I did drink more than a glass of it, could I stand up afterward?”

“I think if you had this with a salty ribeye,” Wines responds, “it would be awesome. But you’re right, it’s a little painful to drink on its own.”

Some ’04s we taste are simply dead, devoid of fruit and tasting decades older than their age. Others emit so much alcoholic heat or volatile acidity on the nose that they “smell like the varnish I just used to clean my coffee table,” in Dufault’s words. Many show fruit flavors that are stewy and raisiny, inspiring descriptors like “cherry cordial” (Wines), “Chambord” (Dufault) and “Concord grape jam” (Einbund).

Still, these wines benefited these somms’ careers enormously. I ask them what it was like in their restaurants when these wines were released, around the year 2007. “I had absolutely no problem selling these wines,” Dufault recalls. Bottles of the cult Cabernets, hundreds of dollars a pop, would fly off the wine list.

A few wines manage to please even the most curmudgeonly of our panel. The Viader Cabernet has bright acidity and suggests some pleasant non-fruit notes: balsam wood, dried sage. “It’s harmonious,” Einbund says. He likes it “because of the (oak) integration, because of the less abusive nose, because the tannins are not dried out.”

Dufault compares the Louis M. Martini Lot No. 1 to “the supermodel in the room,” by which she means “it’s a little too perfect.”

In some cases the wines haven’t aged well literally: No one wants a prematurely senile wine that tastes more of mold than of fruit. But many are nuanced propositions. Their failure to age well is figurative, not literal: As with the Louis Martini, the tasters concede that they are balanced, even at high alcohol levels — but still maintain that they wouldn’t drink them today. They’re just not their style. Which really means: They do not conform to our current collective sense of taste.

It occurs to me that what we dislike in the flight is its homogeneity. Beyond the fact that the wines are made from the same grape and region in the same year, most seem to be reaching for the same exact paradigm. Very ripe grapes, check. Lots of flavor extraction from the grape skins, check. Toasty oak barrels, check. Success for these wines was measured not by their distinctiveness but by how expertly they emulated this narrow prototype.

And that flies in the face of the vibrant individuality we’ve come to fetishize in the year 2019. We reject homogeneity at every turn now. Instead of Napa Cab, our most progressive restaurants are proselytizing Sicilian Frappato, Georgian Rkatsiteli, skin-fermented Ribolla Gialla. If it was once in vogue to seek out wines of monolithic power, now it’s fashionable to praise wines that eschew oak influence and reject technology. Today’s avante-garde natural wine movement demands “living wines,” which may evolve unpredictably and be variable from bottle to bottle.

Tasting the outdated 2004s makes me wonder: Does everything go out of style? Does anything get to be timeless? Maybe not — and maybe, for wine, that’s OK. If one of the reasons we love wine is its ability to express its vintage, can that expression be cultural as well as meteorological? If they don’t always conform to the reigning style of the day, so be it.

And yet there is one wine in our tasting that seems to defy it all. The 2004 Smith-Madrone from Spring Mountain happens to carry a modest 13.9% alcohol, but that’s not the point. By the time we get to it, the 30th wine in our lineup, our mouths are parched and our tongues fatigued. But something in me perks up when I put my nose in the glass.

It’s not the most youthful wine on the table. It bears some telltale signs of aging — cigar box, leather, a browning rim. Still, it’s alive, pulsing with energy, generous with blackberry, currant, licorice and at the same time, restrained and delicate.

What makes the Smith-Madrone so compelling is that it could have been made in any era. It’s a product not of fashion but of principle. It abides by fundamental standards of wine quality — balance, simplicity — that have never gone out of style, and never will.

Tasting the Smith-Madrone, it seems clear to me that today’s trendiest wines have more in common with 2004 than their makers would like to imagine. In the annals of taste, wines that are immoderately funky or excruciatingly lean will have just as short of a shelf life as the extravagantly ripe wines of the aughts.

No matter what form it takes, excess will always get old. But sometimes, when something stays the course, ignores the fads, keeps it simple, we get a taste of timelessness.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Her weekly newsletter, Drinking With Esther, is delivered to inboxes on Thursdays; sign up at sfchronicle.com/newsletters. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob