Visit & Learn About The World Famous Napa Valley, California -V is for Vino Wine Show (full episode)

Welcome to the world famous Napa Valley. It's the wine mecca of America. The allure and prestige of castles and heavy hitter wineries, household names everywhere you look, celebrity passion projects, world renowned restaurants, and land that sells for up to a million dollars an acre. We're going to find out why. Welcome to V is for Vino. Let's watch, learn, and drink. This may not be the place where wine began in America, but the Napa Valley is without question the place that put America on the wine map. And while 90% of wine made in America is made in California, only 4% of that comes from the Napa Valley. But the small amount of wine they do produce here has gained international recognition and made sure America always has a place at the international wine table. Napa is located about 55 miles northeast of San Francisco, tucked east of Sonoma County and south of Lake County. The valley itself is framed by mountains on either side, which help moderate the temperature and protect from wind and rain. Only 2% of the world has a dry Mediterranean climate like Napa. That means not too hot, not too cold, long growing season with minimal temperature change and rainfall. It's not only the perfect place to grow grapes, but it's also the perfect place to live. That's why so many people love it here. Napa's had its fair share of challenges. The first Napa winery was started by Charles Krug in 1861. But in the start of the 20th century, a devastating root louse called Veloxera wiped out 80% of the vineyards, and in 1920, Prohibition put almost every winery out of business. It's really only in the last 50 years that Napa has become the icon that we know it as today. And for that story, we need to take a trip to Paris. The year was 1976. A man named Stephen Spurrier, who was running a wine shop in Paris, invited some of the most esteemed, well-credentialed wine professionals in all of France to participate in a blind tasting competition of French versus Californian wines at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Paris. The judges would taste 10 Chardonnays, 4 from Burgundy, and 6 from California, and then move on to the Reds. All of this was done more of a publicity stunt than anything else, and the competition might as well have been rigged. No one, and I mean no one, expected the American wines to stand a chance. After all, these were the French, the masters of terroir, and the kings of all things refined, and the Californian winemakers were seen as a bunch of dopes who didn't know how to make wine. But then the unthinkable happened. First place of the white round was a 1973 Chateau Montelena from Napa Valley, and the American wines took three of the top four spots. At this point, the judges were alarmed to say the least. So in the next Red Wine round, they tried even harder to distinguish the French from American wines to assure a French victory. But alas, the winner was a 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. Beating four first growth Bordeaux's, wines that sold for thousands of dollars and had famed reputations, and one lone reporter from Time Magazine caught the whole thing. The fallout was massive. Time Magazine published an article claiming victory, while the French press tried to downplay the event in any way they could. But it didn't matter. It was too late. It was a shot heard around the world, and Napa had pulled the trigger. It proved that Napa wines could not only stand toe-to-toe with the best wines on the planet, but gave California its opening to enter the world stage. Today's featured grapes are Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc. These grapes are most famously made in a place called Bordeaux, which is in the west side of France. Bordeaux makes some of the most highly sought after, famed, and consequently expensive wines on the planet. Names like Petrus, Hobrian, Margaux, Latour may not mean anything to you, but for some winos, it's all they think about. And while white Bordeaux wines are great in their own right, it's the red Bordeaux wines that everybody loves. What exactly is a Bordeaux blend? Well, it's any combination of five grape varietals, but 90% of the time, it's mostly Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot that dominates the blend. What does this all have to do with Napa Cabernet Sauvignon? Well, the reality is most Napa Cabernet Sauvignons are actually Bordeaux blends. See, the law says that only 75% of what's listed on the label has to be in the wine. So a lot of winemakers make Bordeaux blends, but they label them Cabernet Sauvignon mostly for a selling point. Americans are more comfortable buying Cabernet Sauvignon than something that has a blend listed on the label. Sauvignon Blanc. If California Chardonnay is Mike Tyson, kind of round and heavy-footed, Sauvignon Blanc is Sugar Ray, all finesse. It's taut, lean, herbal, and an acidity that cuts right through the heart of the wine. It's actually the mother of our other grape, Cabernet Sauvignon. See, in the 17th century, Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc crossed to form Cabernet Sauvignon. And it kind of makes sense. They all share a very similar green characteristic. Cabernet Franc is stewed bell peppers, Cabernet Sauvignon, mint, menthol, and fresh bell peppers. But Sauvignon Blanc, everything green under the sun. Grass primarily, but dill, jalapeno, lime, green apple, gooseberry, other citrus fruits and stone fruits are pretty common as well. It's a perfect pairing for most foods because it's got a great amount of acidity, so it's perfect with anything else green especially. Think your salad course or vegetables. Cabernet Sauvignon. It's the classic international grape varietal. It's grown pretty much everywhere in the world that grows grapes. It's kind of like the George Clooney of wine. It's rugged yet refined, ages well, and loved by pretty much everybody. It's got a lot of dark fruit flavors, so black cherry, blue fruits, and then blackberry, cassis, blackcurrant, also some green notes like eucalyptus and menthol. With oak aging, which it usually has, it can get some spice notes. And with age, it gets leather and cigar box. It ages really well, and that's because it has a very high skin to juice ratio. If you look here, you can see how much skin there is compared to how little juice there is. And that makes a very high tan in wine, which allows some of these wines to age for 20, 30, 40 years plus. It was time to head to the vineyards where I'd meet Sarah of Elizabeth Spencer Wines. I'm getting you in basically what is the middle of harvest. Tell me a little bit about what it's like during harvest time. Yeah, you're basically on call 24-7. Well, harvest is really exciting. You don't get a lot of sleep, but you make up for it in just the stimulation. And it's this kind of, you remember why you got into it. The smells in the winery are always just so incredible this time of year. We've noticed that. Yeah, everywhere we go, it smells great. It's really infectious. Can you tell a little bit about Elizabeth Spencer? Tell me just what you can about the brand and how it got started. Elizabeth came from marketing. She met Spencer, who was in fine wine distribution out in Virginia. And they both had some background in restaurants. After a long courtship, they decided to get together, as it were. And they formed the brand Elizabeth Spencer and had their first Cabernet release in 1998. Elizabeth Spencer doesn't own any of their own vineyards. We contract with high-quality growers to supply us with the fruit we need to make our wines. And that's a fairly common practice. It is a common practice. In the Napa Valley, it's probably roughly 50-50. I don't know how that shakes out in terms of acreage, but there are still estate wineries like this one, White Rock Vineyards, that makes only wine from their own fruit. But they also make, they grow more fruit than they need for their own program. And they will do what they did for me, which is sell other wineries the grapes. What is it like growing and being a winemaker in the Napa Valley, in a place where you've got these mega producers? Because the Napa Valley has, you know, this reputation, for good reason, of growing high-quality grapes, it always ups the ante. In the same way you may have a restaurant town like San Francisco or New York kind of pushing everything forward, Napa's kind of that for the wine industry. That's a great analogy, yeah. They tend to be at the vanguard of implementing things that we've discovered in university. And it also just attracts very talented winemakers and very smart people. I think that the people that are drawn into this industry are extremely passionate. And it's a really interesting combination of people that are artistic, but very scientific. Alright, so tell me a little bit about what we have here. We have Sauvignon Blanc. It's a certified California organically farmed, sourced from a couple of different vineyard sites in Mendocino. We want to see something that is really pure, good acid, it's bright, it is focused. Awesome minerality on the nose in particular. I think we get a little bit of that gooseberry. There is a little bit of white flower, pink grapefruit peel. Yeah, lots and lots of citrus. And the more I get into this, the more kind of floral it becomes. So I always get a little bit of capsicum, green pepper. This is such a great food wine. I always say anything green is always safe. Any kind of green salads or vegetables or anything. But you could get up to this with a lot of white fish and white meat dishes. Sure, crab meat. Spencer would say crab meat and avocado salad. So the tasting room is in downtown Rutherford. It's a really cool spot. I love kind of the vibe in there. Well, the tasting room is in the old Rutherford post office. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's a very cool building. Purchased the building in 2006. They had to do a major retrofit, but they wanted to keep some of the integrity of the old architecture. It's very small in the actual tasting room, and you definitely feel like you can engage with somebody and talk with them about the wines. It's very kind of an intimate tasting in a place where some of these grandiose tasting rooms kind of wash out the wine itself. Sure, yeah. We don't have a fountain yet. No infinity pool quite yet. No infinity pool. All right, so now we have our Cabernet. Well, it really is kind of a flagship wine for us since Elizabeth and Spencer have been making Cabernet since 1998. It's sourced from a number of different vineyards in the Napa Valley. So in any given year, we might have some fruit from Mount Vitor, some fruit from the Stag's Leap area, fruit from Coombsville, fruit from Calistoga. I might have 5% new French oak in these wines. I don't want the oak to sit on top of the wine. Yeah, and right away you can see it's integrated. I can get a little bit of everything. I get the fruit coming through. It feels like kicking a dead horse, but, you know, elegance. You want elegance in your Cabernet. You want structure. You want grip. You want tannin. You want all of those things that make it appropriate to have with food. But you also want an expression of fruit. In five years, I expect this to have a little more vetiver and chocolate. You also get a little bit of sweetness, maybe like a sweet spice. There's a little bit of tobacco there. Yeah. Some cola. And it drinks a little darker on the palate than it does on the nose. Once you really dig into it, you see that it's got structure. I recommend decanting it, especially in the first two, three, four years of its life. I think you'll have it a little more open and offering after decanting. Well, thank you so much. This is awesome. Cheers. Cheers. Sarah and I went to the Crush facility, and she told me to wear shorts. I should have asked why. We talked a little bit about the process from taking the red grapes that we sorted today and putting them into a tank. So we have Syrah that has just been yeasted. Oh, wow. And that's all the way down with grapes. God, that smells so good. It smells like fresh-baked bread. That is the yeast, yes. Very cool. You can feel that heat coming off of it. That's pretty crazy. I wanted to do an experiment, though. I've got some of this fruit, which I have put into three small bins. And I'm going to treat that fruit totally different than how I treat this fruit. So this tea bin is exactly the same as the tank, but we've inoculated it with a totally different yeast strain. In the case of these guys, we're going to kind of let them go on their own and see how they do. And these are the whole cluster. But these are also whole cluster ferment. Same thing, but we're going to stomp on this guy. Do you really believe you are on the safe side? Living on, living on waste. Do you really believe you are on the safe side? Living on, living on waste. Is that the best that you can do? Welcome to the V is for Vino Nerd Lab. We take complicated wine topics and make them simple. Today we're talking about tannin. Tannin. It's not something that you do on the beach. Thank you. Tannin. It's one of the five essential elements of wine. It is a chemical compound or phenol that's found in the skin, stems, and seeds of the grapes. It's a bitterness or an astringency, and it also contributes a little body character. It gives wine like a firmness. It's only found in red wines, and this is because red wines are the only wines that actually sit with their skin, stem, and seeds. White wines, we just press the juice very quickly, and we let it go. Consequently, these skins, the thicker they are, the more tannin is going to be in the final wine. Thick-skinned grapes like Syrah and Cabernet and Merlot are going to have more tannin than the thin-skinned grapes, say Pinot Noir, Gamay, things like that. Now, there's a couple foods that we have that actually have tannin in them. Walnuts and a lot of nuts have tannin, and tea, black tea specifically. We're going to do a little experiment here. Take a black teabag, put it in some water, and steep it for a really long time. If you're supposed to steep it for four or five minutes, we're going to leave it go for like 15, 20. Seriously, get out of here. Here, watch these clips of slow-motion turtles we shot. And we're back. How about them turtles? We've got our overly-steeped tea here, and give it a taste. Now, taste that bitterness and astringency, and especially how it dries out your mouth. That is tannin. How do you fix it? Well, you could try adding a little acid. People add lemon to tea, but it's really just going to enhance it. It will enhance the acid, and it will enhance the bitter. You could try sugar. It would kind of help. It would basically make it very sweet in the front of the tea, and still have that bitterness in the back. No, the real solution here is cream. So if you add a little cream to the tea in the form of fat, and then now give your tea a try. Much better. See, what happens is the tannins bond with the protein in the fat, and they soften both. Now, it stands to reason that if you can fix overly-tannic tea with fat, you can fix tannic wine with fat. So that's why Cabernet Sauvignons are often paired with a fatty steak, like a ribeye. They go together really well, and it helps soften the tannins in the wine. Tannin also acts as a preservative, a natural preservative for wine. It's why some Cabernet Sauvignons and Barolos can last for 40, 50 years in age. And tannin helps preserve it. And this actually helps both the wine and the tannin. See, with age, tannins become softer, and the wine becomes more complex and exciting. I hope you enjoyed this Nerd Lab on tannin. Keep geeking out. After a hard day of wine tasting, the locals, they're heading to Torque. My restaurant baby is what I would like to refer to it as. Contemporary American restaurant located in Napa. The meaning of contemporary meaning we're not really pigeonholed to one cuisine. We can kind of take products and cook them how they're best prepared. Everything rooted in a really great French or Italian technique, with those ingredients brought into the mix. You know, I grew up in the industry. I started washing dishes at nine. My father was a hotelier, GM at a hotel, and put me on a milk crate and had me clean silverware for about five hours. And that was it. That was it. Fast forward 20 years, and here you are. Yeah, fast forward 35 years, you know? Crazy. And just decided that I really wanted to open a restaurant here in Napa. It is the quintessential American wine country, in my opinion. And just the quality of produce is unsurpassed. There's so many other things that I wouldn't want to do that I could do that would probably be easier. But for me, this is really my life's goal, was to always have my own place. And be able to choose the direction it goes, and what we're going to do, and what the ambience is like. Almost a fine dining technique, with kind of the casual atmosphere that makes it fun. And meaning, like, a lot of fine dining restaurants, you go in there, it's very quiet. And we try and take that pretentiousness out of it. If you walk in here, the music's loud, the dining room's loud. You know, people are talking and having a good time. And we put a product in front of you that you would hope to get at one of those restaurants. There's two things that I don't like to label this restaurant. And that's, like, farm-to-table, farm-to-fork, market-driven. But we're market-driven. You know, we go to the farmer's market at least once a week. We have farmers that drive up to our door with produce. We have some other purveyors that either raise ducks or game birds. Or we have a local fisherman from about 40 miles away over in Sonoma. He'll pull up to the back door two or three days a week with live king salmon right now. Wow. We cook based off of what's coming in the door here. A lot of times the dialogue we have with the cooks and the sous chef says, What are we going to do with that? And I look at them and I say, I have no idea yet. Let's figure it out. But we bought it, and it's pretty cool, and let's not waste it. Well, I'd love to go get to cooking. You want to show us some stuff? Yeah, definitely. I'd love to. Cool. All right, Chef, this is the Napa Valley. I'm expecting big things. So what are we doing today? We're going to kind of do a play on a Middle Eastern style tomato salad with bread and labneh. You're speaking to a Lebanese guy, so that's right up my alley. Whatever varieties we could really get. And then you just use whatever you can get, whatever's fresh, whatever they're bringing. Whatever's good, yeah. Totally seasonal. It's the best way for us to be. So we're just looking to cut the tomato thick slices because we're going to marinate it with a little bit of sherry vinegar and olive oil. Okay, good. And then salt. Really important. Probably pulls some of those moistures right out and kind of tenderizes them. Yeah, definitely. Then we're going to take some good local fennel, and I like the contrast that gives the sweetness to the tomatoes. Greek yogurt, and then just some fresh lemon zest. This is some fresh garlic. Okay. I think to stay traditional to where this dish would be from, you need that bite. Then just a little juice. Pinch of salt. Okay. Touch of pepper. And then we're just going to mix that up with a spoon. You know, we always have leftover bread. So we'll tear some bread, and then we're actually going to saute it real quickly just to get some crisp on it and flavor. I'm going to take a garlic clove. Always leave the skin on garlic so that way if we do get a little color on it, we're not making it bitter. Oh, interesting. I like that trick. And it's a good way to judge when your oil is hot too. Ooh, it's hot. I don't know how you chefs do it back here all day. Somebody has to. And we're just flipping this to make sure it doesn't take too much color. Yeah. And if you see where it's starting to look a touch dry, you just add a little more oil to it. And then we're just going to put this on a paper towel to make sure it's not greasy. Now you said this dish kind of has a Middle Eastern roots to it. I think Mediterranean, Palestine, Israel, Morocco, Italy, the area, you know, the food is very similar. And then we're just going to put a couple dollops of the labneh on the plate. It's nice and thick. You know, it's something where you can drag the tomato through it, and then the bread just sporadically on the plate. And then a couple other ingredients that we're going to add to this. Fennel pollen from here in Napa. This is coarse sea salt because everything needs salt. And this is pimenta espalette. So this is from the Basque region of both Spain and France, and it's a dried red chili pepper. It's more smoky than spicy. This is anise hyssop. So we have the fennel, which is anise. We have the fennel pollen. And then we're just going to tear some fresh anise hyssop. Flowers and all. Wow, look at that. And it's got a really neat, light, licorice-y flavor. Lemon zest. Wow. And you get the purple, the yellow, the red, the green. It's gorgeous. Thank you. That's it. I hate to, I even hate to bother it. It just, you know, you look at it all day. Oh, yeah. Oh, you know what? That spice is great. You know, and all these different colored tomatoes, too, they all have variance in flavor, you know. Some are higher in acid. Some are sweeter. This red one here, a lot less firm than, say, this one, which is cool because you get that play on textures. The thing I can't get over here is how that little bit of spice does so much for the dish. Yeah. Absolutely gorgeous. Excellent. Awesome. We paired this with the Sauvignon Blanc for a few reasons. The acidity in the tomatoes really needs a nice, high-acid wine to match it. And the floral notes of the wine go really well with the floral and licorice flavors of the anise hyssop. Plus, the acidity in the wine cuts right through the fat that you find in the yogurt. Looks like we're busting out the big guns. Big guns. Steak. Woo! I love it. Steak. You know, we're in cap country. Prime dry-aged New York strip. Look how thick that cut. Yeah. We're like, we're this thick. It's about 20 ounces. It's good for two people. A good amount of salt on the outside. Pepper, too. Give me your three essential steak mistakes. Number one is they let their father cook it, which means it's either blood raw or well done. So you avoid that. That's number one. Definitely a very, very hot pan. The third thing that's the most important thing is that it actually rests. And at this point, we're going to add something that's integral to the flavor of everything, and that is butter. It's going to impart a nice nutty flavor on it, but it's all going to come out. It's not something that we're going to keep in and we're going to pour on the plate. It's like a bath. You get that nice froth going. Yeah, definitely. We have a nice crust on both sides of the meat. Perfect. I'm going to take it out, put it on the cookie sheet. I like that, too. The rack, too. Yeah, so that way there's air circulation under it. So we're at 500 degrees here. And after we've got that sear on the outside, we're going to let it cook for about 10 minutes. I'm just going to discard that fat. But leave a little bit of it inside. A touch more olive oil. So we're actually going to cook the potatoes inside with some of the beef renders. Oh, wow, so you kind of season that pan. And these are Magic Murners. So these are hand-dug by a friend of mine over in Sonoma County. Hand-dug potatoes. Hand-dug. They're almost yellow. They're like peach colored. Yeah, they're crazy. And the texture is light and fluffy and creamy. Once again, garlic with the skin on. We're going to take some of our potatoes, put them in with a hot pan. Lots of butter. And we're going to get that nice and frothy. A little bit of salt. We're actually going to put this in the same oven with the steak. They'll actually cook in the 10 minutes that it actually takes to cook that steak. So next we're going to do some nice summer vegetables. Some beautiful little squash, and they have the flowers on them. Some fresh scallions. Right. And we're just going to cut some little, like, one-inch batons. So once again, olive oil. The garlic and the skin. And we're going to start with the squash. So at this point, I am going to add the onion. A touch of water. Okay. And just enough where it's going to cause it to lightly steam. So, you know, when I look at flavor profile of the caps from Napa, big in fruit, big on the palate, herbaceous. And so we're going to find things that assist in that and bringing that out. You know, I get a lot of mint. And so we're going to actually use some mint in the dish. This is what's referred to as chocolate mint. It's kind of like mint chocolate ice cream if you could put it in a plant. Yeah. We're going to put it in a steak. You take a little knife, you take a fork, and you just want to give it a poke. So that's ideal. That's what we're looking for. Okay. Some more summer vegetables to those. So what we're going to add are Padron peppers. So it's a Spanish variety. They're more that, like, bell pepper flavor that you do get from cab. And we're just going to get them a little blistered in that frothy butter. Add some cherry tomatoes to that. Take the onions, and we're going to make some nice, fine slices. And then we'll take our nice scallions here, and we're just going to finish our potatoes, the chocolate mint. This is how you make sure the steak is rested properly. So now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take the vegetables, and we're just going to put them on one side of this platter. All right, let's see how the steak is. Oh, look at that. The ring on the outside, just to sear it in. And then just pink all the way through. Nice finishing salt, like we put on the tomato salad. Fresh cracked black pepper on top. Last, some of the chocolate mint, raw. And back to that kind of Mediterranean-California connection. Some beautiful taggiasca olives. Are you kidding me? And then last, we're going to do a little bit of horseradish. Oh, look at that. Fresh horseradish. Yeah. You know what I love about this, too, is that your handprint is all over it. Where are you going to start? I mean, I don't know. I probably got to start with the meat. Is that okay? Yeah, it's totally acceptable. All right. Oh, my God. So the first thing that hits me is that cut of beef, the dry-aged beef, and that little bit of funk. And then the second thing I get is that beautiful, that olive, that little bit of briny kind of salt, which I love. Oh, my gosh. And it melts in your mouth. I normally just explain what the wine does with it. You did my job for me. You took it a step further and said, we have these comparing flavors. We can get these menthol and these mint flavors from the chocolate mints. We can balance some of that freshness from the berry and the fruit flavors with the freshness of some of these herbs and some of these spices. So I love that you've taken it a step further. In addition to all the comparing flavors, the big, bold dish needs a big, bold wine. And a tannin structure in the wine goes great with the fat in the steak. Unreal. Thank you. Start to finish unreal. Cheers to that. Thank you, Vince. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having me. We ended our day at the Oxbow Public Market, Napa's blend of restaurants, stores, and shops that carry, well, a little bit of everything. Meats and cheeses, wood fire pizza, sushi, oysters, craft beer, specialty bitters, and of course, wine. I hope you enjoyed the one and only Napa Valley. We'll see you next time on V is for Vino. Get the wine, full episodes, and more at visforvino.com