Napa Valley has perfected Cabernet Sauvignon. But is it starting to all taste the same?

Among the wine cognoscenti, it’s a widely accepted tenet that anything Brown touches turns to gold. The critics fawn: He’s received over 50 perfect 100-point scores from publications including the Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator. Ardent fans will buy any wine made by “TRB,” sight unseen.

His star may be burning brightest at the moment, but Brown, 50, is not entirely without peers. He’s part of an elite order of Napa winemaking consultants that includes Philippe Melka, Mike Smith, Andy Erickson, Aaron Pott, Celia Welch, Julien Fayard, Jean Hoeflinger, Sam Kaplan, Tony Biagi and Heidi Barrett. These professionals have been in demand for years. But now, it feels as if having one of these star consultants on board is more than an advantage for a new luxury Napa winery — it’s a de facto requirement.

That demand has grown in tandem with the cost of doing business in Napa, Brown suggests.

“These investments are now so expensive that they’re nervous to hand it over to just anyone,” says Brown of new winery owners. “It’s like, ‘we just put $100 million into this, we have to hire me or Philippe.’”

This economic reality has driven a situation where more of Napa’s wines are becoming concentrated in the hands of fewer winemakers. It’s led many observers to wonder: Is that making all of Napa’s wines taste the same?

 

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Wine and money have always been inextricable, but America’s most famous wine region has a unique relationship to its own wealth. Owning land and making wine in Napa Valley is a singular kind of status symbol, pursued by the richest people in the world from video-game moguls to former NFL team owners. Much has been written about the valley’s so-called “lifestyle vintners,” who are perceived as happy to throw money at a winery without caring much about whether it will ever deliver a return.

The expense of getting into the game has never been greater. Vineyard land in Napa’s top areas now sells for $300,000 to $500,000 per acre, according to Jordan Bentley, a Realtor and partner in St. Helena’s Wine Country Consultants. It can stretch close to $1 million per acre for the most sought-after pockets, Bentley says. New wineries require a parcel size of at least 10 acres, per county rules.

Because real estate costs so much here, because of rigorous restrictions on development, because demand is higher than supply — for these and many other reasons, Napa Valley wines tend to be expensive. How expensive? By one conventional measurement — the price of grapes as tracked by the USDA — the average price of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon this year should be $80 per bottle.

That’s a costly bottle for most people, and yet it still belies the pricing that’s become commonplace in Napa’s uppermost echelon. Of the 46 Napa Cabernets rated 96 points or higher by Wine Spectator within the last year, the average price is $345. Only seven cost under $200.

This pricing, which predates the current wave of inflation pervading the U.S. economy, reflects the willingness of wealthy consumers to pay for these wines. And it rests on the reputation, painstakingly built by the Napa wine industry over decades, for high-quality — some might say perfect — wine. That’s where Napa’s elite consultant winemakers come in.

The job of a winemaking consultant was not always so common. It used to be that every winery, pretty much, employed a regular winemaker: a full-time employee who worked for just one company.

That started to change around 1995, says Philippe Melka, who got his first consulting jobs in that year. “The ’90s were booming,” says Melka, who currently has about 25 clients. “A lot of people from other industries realized the wine business could be a good business.”

Titans who had made fortunes in real estate, software, banking and other fields bought land here, and they needed winemakers — but, if the property was small, maybe not a full-time one. The first true star consultant was Michel Rolland, who initially gained acclaim in his native Bordeaux in France and eventually began working with wineries around the world, including several in Napa such as Harlan, Darioush and Merryvale. (Disclosure: I was once an intern at a winery owned by Rolland in Argentina. I saw but never met him.)

By 2003, Rolland was working with more than 100 wineries in 12 countries, according to a Decanter article from that year. That geographic expanse earned him the nickname “the flying winemaker,” which some of his critics used pejoratively, implying a lack of seriousness. The argument, essentially, was that Rolland was flitting all over the world, making wines that fit his particular mold, and thereby erasing the nuances of each individual vineyard. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Rolland’s influence was the subject of a 2006 documentary, “Mondovino,” which portrayed the globalization of wine with skepticism. In the film, Rolland shares culpability with wine critic Robert Parker, who is likewise perceived as inciting a global homogenization of wines — often referred to as “Parkerization.”

Rolland’s success grew the clout of winemaking consultants generally, paving the way for people like Melka and Brown to become the wine-world celebrities they are today.

But when Brown got his start, the barrier to entry was fairly low.

Brown came to Napa in 1996, in his early 20s, and the next year got a job at Turley, which was creating a sensation with its lush, muscular Zinfandels. By 2001, Brown was making wine for Tor, Schrader and Outpost, thanks in part to introductions from Turley winemaker Ehren Jordan.

It now sounds laughable that a relative newcomer would be entrusted with an ambitious Napa winery, let alone three. That vintners would take a chance on a novice like Brown is an indication of how much lower the stakes were back then. “The days of my story are over,” Brown says.

At first, Brown’s name grew because of his talents as a winemaker Over time, it took on greater meaning. Today, his mere initials lend automatic publicity to wineries he works with, and confer credibility with critics who assign scores. The success of any TRB wine, like a Melka or Rolland wine, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Brown’s consulting fee generally starts around $60,000 per year, he says, and can reach $700,000 in the case of wineries like Schrader. “I like to start a little lower and then work higher as the project gains traction,” Brown explains. “I have long-standing clients that started at $20,000 but are now over $200,000 given longevity and financial success.”

With 45 (or so) gigs now, Brown can’t do everything himself. He has a team that includes Tim Beranek at Mending Wall Winery, where many of Brown’s clients’ wines are made; John Giannini at Outpost; and Anne Fogerty, who runs the day-to-day operations at Rivers-Marie, the new, 9,000-square-foot, $9 million Calistoga winery that Brown built with his wife, Genevieve Marie Welsh.

On a recent morning at Mending Wall, Brown pours me 12 of his wines. We taste the 2019 Matthew Wallace Regusci Vineyard Cabernet, which has the smooth quality of milk chocolate. The 2019 Caterwaul Cemetery Vineyard Cabernet, bursting with flavors of blackberries and roses. The 2019 Schrader To Kalon Vineyard Cabernet, a heady, fragrant wine that feels like velvet on my tongue.

Brown’s creations are always impeccable. They taste ripe but never pruney, fruity but never outright sweet. There’s not a tannin out of place. For what they are — expensive Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon — they are perfection.

His legacy is already reverberating through Napa. One Brown protegee, Mike Smith, is among the newer consultants to gain renown. “I make wine the way Thomas taught me,” says Smith, who works with eight brands, and has had as many as 14.

Smith has cultivated a uniquely steadfast legion of fans. Just visit the geeky forum Wine Berserkers, where devotees compare tasting notes from Smith’s projects including Myriad, Quivet, Scarlett and Becklyn. Some commenters note they’ll no longer buy wines from wineries after Smith has departed. His own name seems to carry more currency than the brand names: Followers refer to them all as “Mike Smith wines.”

And there truly is such a thing as a “Mike Smith wine.” He has his regimen down to a science, he says, starting with a slow-acting yeast strain from Sonoma County’s Williams Selyem winery. He barrels the wine while it’s still sweet, which he finds “rounds out the new oak,” integrating the barrel’s toasty vanilla flavors more harmoniously.

“People like the textural quality of my wines,” says Smith. New clients typically come to him because “they’re looking for more density” or “to kick up ripeness,” he adds. For many of his projects, he buys fruit from vineyards owned by Andy Beckstoffer, known for charging Napa’s highest grape prices. His most upscale wines, like Myriad’s Elysian ($300) and Empyrean ($195) cuvees, come from Beckstoffer-owned vineyards and are aged in the vaunted, hard-to-procure barrels of French cooperage Darnajou.

Like his mentor’s creations, Smith’s wines are a certain kind of paragon. The reviewers agree: He’s earned 20 100-point scores from publications including the Wine Advocate and Jeb Dunnuck.

Winemakers like Smith and Brown are quick to deflect the now familiar jab that all their wines taste alike. “If I had a formula, you’d be able to tell,” Brown says.

Brown is right. His wines do not all taste the same. Still, there is an overarching style, a mood, to his Cabernets. If Brown’s wines bear a signature, it might be described as a silkiness. The prototypical TRB Cab has seamless, lustrous tannins that often seem to melt irresistibly into the surrounding wine.

Similarly, there is a thread through Smith’s portfolio. A Mike Smith wine has a mouthcoating weight that feels dense on the tongue. Its flavors announce their deliciousness loudly: blackberry, currant, boysenberry, fig. If the wines seem to teeter on the edge of excessively ripe-tasting fruit, they stop just short of the excess.

They and other elite consultants have chiseled the ideal Napa Cabernet into existence — a masterpiece that tastes distinctively plush, gratifying and substantial.

And with the astonishing prices that Napa wines command, can these wines afford to be anything less than a masterpiece?

The price of Napa wines today doesn’t merely reflect demand on the luxury market. It reflects more practical line items, too, namely the no-expense-spared approach to the winemaking itself. The standard production routine in Napa these days starts with those sky-high land prices or, if you can’t afford to buy the land yourself, purchased grapes that cost more than anywhere else in California. The playbook continues with fruit-sorting equipment that can cost $70,000 to $200,000 and ends with pricey oak barrels, each holding 25 cases worth of wine, that often cost over $1,000 apiece.

These masterpiece Napa wines are expensive; we might even say that they taste expensive. That plush, prototypical Napa Cabernet is the vinous equivalent of a buttery-soft mink stole, a smooth-driving Lamborghini, a blindingly sparkly 4-carat diamond. Its form conveys its status.

Yet all economies are precarious, and even the winemaking consultants who helped create this one fear that it could reach a tipping point someday, maybe someday soon. The cost to produce a bottle of wine is soon going to be $200, Melka tells me. That’s the cost — the bottle price, he says, will have to be $250 to $300 if the producer is to make any money.

Fruit at some of Melka’s vineyards, he says, doubled in price in recent years, even at what he describes as “the B+ vineyards.” “We’re reaching pricing that scares me,” Melka says. “How are we going to survive?”

After all, Brown’s anecdotal example of a $100 million winery investment is not hyperbole. For those who have spent that money, the stakes are restrictively high. They can’t alienate the existing Napa Valley customer base. They can’t eschew the prototypically luxurious style of Napa wine. Most of all, they can’t afford to hire an unproven winemaker who could turn out to be mediocre.

The wine can’t just be good. It has to be perfect.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley