It’s a situation I never thought I’d find myself in: I’m the lone visitor at Harlan Estate, one of Napa’s most elite wineries. Perched on a divan in the “tasting room” — it feels like the fanciest living room I’ve ever set foot in — I watch as estate director Don Weaver, gregarious and hospitable, opens three bottles of wine and pours them into glasses on the coffee table before me. He reclines on the sofa opposite mine, awaiting my reactions. There is no one else on the entire property; it feels as if my voice might echo.

If each glass contains a 6-ounce pour, I am sitting in front of $500 worth of liquid.

What would Harlan taste like? It’s a wine with a myth, firmly in the history books as one of Napa’s most expensive, most sought-after, most critically acclaimed products. It’s a wine I never expected to taste. But would I like it?

Harlan’s reputation is for big, lush Cabernets, which, depending on the crowd, can be praise or a gibe. In certain circles, the wines get a bad rap, dismissed as jammy, saccharine fruit bombs.

I pick up the 2012. A warm vintage. At first sniff, I might have called it as Syrah: It smells ripe and robust, like roasted meat and blackberry jam. I smell dry cinnamon spice, pencil lead. When I taste it, it’s enormous. Its power swells to all corners of the mouth, pierced by a firm frame of acid. The cinnamon returns on the palate — could that be a little too much oak? It flirts with excess, as if coyly considering and then rejecting it.

Next, the 2011, a notoriously cold and difficult year. I immediately recognize it as a very differently styled Cabernet than the ’12. It brings fresh, damp forest floor; mint leaf. The texture remains rich, and the tannins are formidable, but its heft is cut by fresh flavors, luxuriating in Cabernet’s herbal side. It merely verges on power.

The two wines’ differences reflect their vintages. And the finesse of the ’11 certainly challenges the fruit-bomb charge. I can see how some might find the ’12 overblown, though I think it carries its power well. It’s like foie gras: primally appealing to the taste buds, though far too rich to have at every meal, and too expensive for that anyway.

Weaver acknowledges that many people assume Harlan wines are overripe and hedonistic. “Our site is so inclined for ripening fruit that for a long time we were being rewarded for ripeness, whereas our real pursuit is harmony,” he says. “I wish more people could taste and see for themselves.”

But few people ever will.

Fewer still will ever visit the Harlan estate, located at an unlisted address off the serpentine Oakville Grade, high up a winding road in a secluded hillside forest. The winery protrudes gloriously from this seclusion: a farmhouse made palatial, in the typical style of its architect Howard Backen.

At this elevation, facing east toward the valley floor, Harlan seems to reign over Napa like a moat-flanked castle on a hill. The 240-acre property wants nothing, perhaps not even people in it. It is complete: as design critic Stanley Abercrombie wrote of it, “neither seeking nor needing crowds of new admirers.”

Weaver’s wish, then, is undermined by this sacred-temple vibe. He can’t have it both ways. The prince cannot be feared and loved.

That’s the paradox now confronting Napa’s cult wineries, a group of ultra-elite Cabernet producers that includes Harlan. Today, the mythic quality of these cult estates is running up against a wine culture that may no longer buy the hype. The castles on the hill remain. But has the crowd wandered?

Back to Gallery The cult of Cabernet: The paradox of Napa’s most... 24 1 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 24 Photo: Colgin 3 of 24 Photo: ERIC RISBERG, AP 4 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 7 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 8 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 9 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 10 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 11 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 12 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 13 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 14 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 15 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 16 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 17 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 18 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 19 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 20 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 21 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 22 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 23 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle 24 of 24 Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle















































Cult fever has existed in Napa for a long time. In the 1950s and 1960s, Stony Hill Chardonnay — which sold the 50 cases of its inaugural 1953 vintage at $21.69 per case (delivery included) — enjoyed a rabid following. If you were in the know, you’d beg your way onto the mailing list. In the 1970s, wine lovers seeking Heitz Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet ($35 a bottle in 1975) would form a line stretching down Highway 29 on release day.

Back then, the barrier to entry was more knowledge-based than financial: You just had to want the wine enough to haul yourself there. More like lining up early on a Saturday at Tartine Bakery. Less like joining a country club.

That changed in the 1980s, which marked a new era of trophy-wine hunting. There was Grace Family Vineyards, launched in 1983, and Dalla Valle, in 1986, both from wealthy newcomers to the valley, generating overflowing mailing lists for their ultra-tiny stockpiles. Grace especially benefited from the newly formed Napa Valley Wine Auction, where in 1985 a five-pack of its ’81 Cabernet commanded $10,000. Suddenly Napa wines were not only desirable; they might even be collectible. A different group of consumers took note.

By 1988, Grace was $63. Opus One, a considerably larger project from Robert Mondavi and Bordeaux’s Baron Philippe de Rothschild, was $62. Dalla Valle launched its Maya bottling that year at $45. At the time these numbers seemed astronomical for Napa. The unprecedented prices coincided with a new critical attention on California wine, a growing interest in wine worldwide and a dot-com boom in the Bay Area. Surely the convergence of all these forces was leading to something.

And it did. Within a six-month period over 1995 and 1996, five new wineries released their first vintages: Araujo, Bryant, Colgin, Harlan and Screaming Eagle. All were Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. All were grown on mid-slope hillsides, neither valley floor nor mountaintop. All were the visions of people who had made their money elsewhere (some with more staggering success than others). All were sold primarily by mailing list, not traditional distribution. And perhaps most notably, all were made in extremely low quantities and released at audaciously high prices for the time, from $36 (Bryant) to $65 (Harlan).

Had they schemed together? No. But they all benefited from their mutual association. Something particular, specific, was fomenting: “Cult wine.” The term is often used indiscriminately, but in the contemporary wine canon, it refers specifically to this group of Napa Cabernet producers.

“They all came out of the chute at the same time and took a new approach to making wine,” says James Laube, Wine Spectator’s chief California critic. “There was a sameness to their style. The richness, the power, the body, the finesse.”

(Many people told me that Laube coined the term “cult wine.” He shrugs this off: “I remember using it, but I can’t say I came up with it.”)

This was the revolution. It wasn’t just any new style of wine; it was a definition of what California could be.

“Suddenly they weren’t just imitating Bordeaux,” says Paul Roberts, now Colgin’s chief operating officer. “They were still Cab, but they had different textures, aromatics. And they were delicious young.”

“It was super exciting at the time to see a whole new category,” says Rajat Parr, who was then a sommelier at Rubicon. “Everyone was talking about them. People would come into the restaurant because they heard we had Screaming Eagle.”

Breaking away from a European paradigm — which holds that serious red wine should be hard, tannic, uninviting in its youth — the cults repositioned ripeness as a virtue. They appealed to a quintessentially American desire for near-term gratification. Who wants to wait 20 years to open a bottle anyway? “We knew our site was going to give us physically ripe fruit and not sacrifice tannins or structure,” Weaver says. “That’s the advantage of the Napa Valley climate. We followed the mandate of our vineyard.”

They also followed the mandates of a finite set of influential players. There’s remarkable overlap in the consultants and winemakers who have had a hand in these wines: David Abreu (Araujo, Bryant, Colgin, Grace, Harlan, Screaming Eagle), Michel Rolland (Araujo, Bryant, Dalla Valle, Harlan, Screaming Eagle), Heidi Peterson Barrett (Dalla Valle, Grace, Screaming Eagle), Helen Turley (Bryant, Colgin). Their imprints are at the helm of the cults wineries’ ripeness revolution — and are responsible for many of the wineries’ similarities.

The minute production levels were another important departure from Bordeaux practices. Compare first-growth Chateau Margaux’s 10,000-17,000 case production of its grand vin to Screaming Eagle’s total production of 500-900 cases. Bryant makes 750 on average.

Why make so little? Maybe your vineyard is small. (Bryant’s is just 12.5 acres.) But the cults also managed to position low yields as a hallmark of higher-quality wines — a key element of the viticulture regimen associated with consultant Rolland. The fewer grapes on the vine, the theory holds, the better the wines will be.

The resulting scarcity of wine turned out to work beautifully to the cults’ advantage. After all, people want what they can’t have. “It’s almost like the cult was the consumer, not the producer,” Weaver says. “It became a sport to get on the lists.” The prices ballooned, but money couldn’t buy them. Suddenly they were showing up on the secondary market, flipped at auction by mailing-list customers who could earn several times over the price they paid to the winery. “When you saw these $50 wines getting sold at auction for $750,” Laube describes, “that prompted some of the wineries to raise their prices, to cut down on profiteering.”

“I look at the secondary market, and right now it’s about $1,000 for Screaming Eagle,” says that winery’s general manager, Armand de Maigret. “That means that people who receive Screaming Eagle have a gift from us.” In fact, at a Wally’s Wine Auctions sale in November, a three-bottle lot of 2012 Screaming Eagle Cabernet sold for $6,100, or $2,033 per bottle; its release price from the winery was $850.

Have these wines transformed from beverage to currency? At what point does wine stop being wine? Weaver remembers when, around the year 2000, the Harlan mailing list shifted noticeably from doctors and lawyers to investment bankers and traders. “That’s when the list wasn’t just avid followers anymore, but people interested in speculating,” he says. “They could see the exponential value.”

And that’s how cult fever broke.

“Sometime around the mid-2000s, the sommelier community started losing interest,” Parr recalls. “The cult wines became too expensive. They are fantastic wines, and for a collector they are totally worth it. But they are inaccessible to a normal person.”

At the same time, other regions of California had begun to generate buzz. Pinot Noir happened. Low alcohol wines came into vogue. “Ripe” became a dirty word. The cults, with their mailing lists secure and their prices continuing to mount, were no longer the hot, new, exciting things.

And what are the cults today, in an age that champions populism and transparency? Now, these wineries have become easy targets for stone-throwing, representing to some people everything that's wrong with Napa.

As a result, the cults have gotten defensive. "I wish people would stop being jealous," Armand de Maigret tells me over the phone one morning. "Before I started at Screaming Eagle, I worked at wineries that were trying to emulate Screaming Eagle, and I was truly jealous. I had had Screaming Eagle only once. The wine was just beautiful, incredibly beautiful. And I bashed it. Why? Because I was jealous."

It’s easy, too, to feel suspicious of the secrecy that Screaming Eagle appears to foster. When I first reached out, de Maigret said he would host me at the winery but requested that my visit be off the record. (He later relented to an on-record phone interview.) Given the winery’s notoriously press-averse policy, I almost felt surprised during my visit when winemaker Nick Gislason opened a number of bottles for me to try.

I found the Screaming Eagle Cabernets to have an aromatic expression that I’d describe as feminine — delicate, floral, lifted. The 2013 oozes with blue fruit; the 2014 smells just as freshly juicy, but is distinguished by darker-fruited cassis. Despite all that succulent fruit, structurally the wines are muscular, chewy, with assertive tannins and marked by plenty of savory character. I admired how they seemed to unfold from an elegant exterior to an edgier interior. As with Harlan, tasting the Screaming Eagle wines seemed to complicate the cult-wine fruit-bomb caricature. (The best wines I tasted at Screaming Eagle, by the way, were Merlot.)

Perhaps it’s too easy to hate these wines. And rejecting them categorically would be a mistake. For they are damn good — and not all the same. Take Colgin, which is marked by a distinctive sylvan element. The recent vintages of Colgin IX Estate brim with sage, cedar, graphite, licorice, evoking irresistible comparisons to the verdant slopes and sweet-smelling air of Pritchard Hill, where they’re grown. Colgin’s are big wines, but they maintain freshness, with a refined tannin structure.

The truth is, you’d have to be an ascetic to dislike them. Who doesn’t love the taste of fruit? They are made in a powerful style, but are well-made in that style.

“Don’t be jealous,” de Maigret repeats. “Don’t hate us because you’ve never tasted the wine.”

But of course, almost no one can taste the wine.

And that’s a shame, I think to myself as I drive away from Harlan. Because not only do these wines give pleasure, but I believe they’re important. I’d venture you can’t understand the arc of Napa Valley wine — indeed, of California wine — without understanding the cults.

My tasting with Weaver, all alone in that grand, cavernous estate, helped me see something I’d never seen before. This was what got everyone so excited in 1996. This is what all the austere, lean wines I keep tasting today — wines more aligned with my budget, and more in vogue with my friends — are reacting against. All those years ago, wines like Harlan had been the proof that California was capable not only of greatness, but also of prestige. And they’d proven that its greatness is distinct from Bordeaux’s: sun-kissed ripeness, plush generosity, youthful charm — all true, resonant expressions of sunny, hedonistic California.

But driving down the shady path toward the Oakville Grade, I still feel shocked by the emptiness of Harlan Estate. Few people will ever even see the winery from the road, let alone enter the property. The beauty of the wines has stayed with me, but I have to wonder whether, in this elaborately secluded forest, they can make a sound if nobody else is around to hear it.