Quick notes from a quick visit to Beta and MacDonald

We made a short visit to Napa prior to a family gathering in the Bay Area. I had particularly wanted to visit with Ketan of Beta fame and of course Alex MacDonald. We made no attempts to visit other places but it didn’t seem too busy driving around.
Some common themes of the wines from these two producers is that they are made in a reductive fashion with a long elevage and only racked prior to bottling. The wines when opened do show wonderful aromatics, but might need 12+ hrs of air for the palate to fill in and become complete.
Ketan’s property where the Jasud wines will come from is on top of Diamond Mountain with blocks located between 1600 and 2000 feet. This means that days are cooler while nights are more moderate than on the valley floor. His view is spectacular looking east with Eisele in the background. Looking from there it finally became clear what an inferno the fires created as the devastation is widespread. Ketan himself lost about a third of his vines, but there is hope some of the root stock might have survived and simply still dormant. Most blocks are planted with St George (another similarity with MacDonald) and there is one own rooted block. The vines came from cuttings from about five well-known vineyards, not from a nursery. There is no spraying and no irrigation system. Whatever nature offers is what you get.
Ketan picks on acid more than ripeness. The finished wines are 12-14, but I’m not sure if they actually reach 14. They are aromatically complex showing some fruit and definitely lots of herbal elements, they are not for pyrazine adverse people!! They spend 30+ months in large barrels, up to 600L. All in all this is an approach more common with making Barolo than Cab. In my opinion the wines are vibrant, fresh, exciting and complex and I’ll keep on buying whatever quantities I’m deemed worthy of purchasing. The style is closest to Ridge, at least if you go back to the wines made before the drought.
For our visit we tasted the one off ’18 Chuy Chard and the ’11, ’16, ’17, and two ’18 Cabs from Montecillo (Spanish pronunciation). These wines generally have a classic blackcurrant leaf and fruit profile. The leafy component is less obvious if you haven’t tried to pick these berries yourself. The fruity component comes with the healthy acids this fruit has, hence the tendency to make it into syrup.
The ’11 was a lovely refined wine showing fewer tannins and good acids. Ready to drink. Sadly I was not trigger happy when the offer came so ’13 was my first purchase.
The ’16 shows rounder and richer, not overly tannic, but in need of time to collect it self and get a bit more complex. This should be in the next offering.
The ’17 was spectacular, a truly great wine. Powerfully tannic, but with so many elements both herbal and fruity. Very complex.
The two ’18 were quite young and bottled fairly recently. One was the standard version with some press juice, while the other was an experiment from free run juice and made for a softer more elegant wine. Both wines were outstanding and might be more crowd pleasing than the ’17. I found them very easy to like even if they weren’t as profound as the ’17.

I’ll definitely be visit again especially with the promise of getting a taste of the ’19 Jasud which was made in such minuscule quantities that it won’t be released. Robert Dentice posted on it recently.

Next day we visited Alex at the MacDonald vineyard. The vines look extremely healthy and the vineyard is positively alive, according to Alex the biodiversity is the highest of any of the vineyards there. The vines planted five years ago (my last visit) now look like vines, they are from cuttings from the vineyard and represent five distinct and unique Cab clones.
We tasted the ’18 which is very near perfection, think of it as a more elegant and poised ’13. There are some refreshing tannins and incredible length. The mid-palate of the MacDonald wines is deceptively light for a CA Cab, as the generic winemaking choice to me generally comes across as very fat and full even with age. Please sell me 6! [cheers.gif]

I do have other Cabs at home ('17 Di Co on deck for tonight), but these two wineries stand out to me as the wines that I must buy.

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I might catch hell here but…Sonoma and Anderson Valley up here in Mendocino are lower priced options. When I have to go to Napa, the f_cking traffic is a mess. I usually go Silverado trail, but too many of the locals know that’s the way to get anywhere. Before Covid I would look at the long line at Taylors Refresher and shake my head. If Cabernet is your thing, then I guess you’ve got to be there. If you want more of a ‘real’ experience, great scenery, short or no lines, better pricing, go to Lake county, Sonoma or Mendocino.

Gotts/Taylor’s is great . What’s your beef (get it)??

Our only trip to Napa was back in 2008, so I know things have changed . We drove up after spending 3 days in SF, and spent one day in Sonoma . We then stayed in St.Helena in Napa County, and toured Napa Valley got 3 days . Call me a phony , but I’m so glad we stayed in Napa and not Sonoma (not that there was anything wrong with it).

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Very interesting – both the possibility that the roots of burned vines might regenerate (plants are persistent!) and the rootstocks on the vines that weren’t hit by the fire. How do the latter avoid phylloxera? Are they high enough up and isolated from other vineyards? Sandy soil?

(FYI, traditional Barolo is generally aged in barrels much larger than 600 liters. A 1,000 tank would be on the small end. And the ratio of surface area to wine volume gets much smaller as the barrel capacity increases.)

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John, The own rooted block is an experiment, the soil is not sandy. Ketan is simply willing to challenge any dogma about how Cabernet should be made incl how to grow it.

Peter - i agree re: the 2011 Beta, had a bottle recently and was drinking beautifully