If there were an award for the largest cajones at the 26th annual San Diego International Wine Competition, Cakebread Cellars and Flora Springs Winery & Vineyards would have finished in a dead heat.
These producers are established presences in the Napa Valley with a long tradition of excellence. Their wines are good and they know it. So boldly they go where many of their neighbors fear to tread, sending their wines up against all comers in a large commercial wine competition.
No worries mates! When you’ve got the goods, you’ve got the goods. Cakebread fared slightly better, although both did extremely well.
Cakebread’s 2005 Dancing Bear Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon, Howell Mountain ($106) won a gold medal and was put forward by the judges to be tasted in the “Sweepstakes” round of voting for Best of Show red wine. Its 2005 Syrah, Carneros, Napa Valley ($50) earned the same lofty accolade: Gold Sweeps.
Chief Judge Michael Franz, the Editor here at WRO, was so impressed with the Cakebread Dancing Bear Ranch Cab that he reviewed it on this week’s WRO Reviews page and gave it a whopping 95 points!
Flora Springs scored gold medals with its 2006 Trilogy, Napa Valley ($65) and 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley ($36). Both wineries drew silver medals for their distinctive Sauvignon Blancs.
What’s impressive about this is not only the performance, but the courage to trust that your wines are as good as you claim they are and that a group of professional wine judges, tasting blind, will agree.
Many producers in the Napa Valley seem to have forgotten that it was a wine competition, the infamous Judgment of Paris, that propelled Napa into national prominence and gave it a leg up on every other wine producing region in the United States.
This spirit of competitiveness, i.e., winning a medal or ribbon at the fair, is as American as apple pie. Nice to see that at Cakebread and Flora Springs they aren’t resting on their laurels, and that both realize there is a time to put up or shut up.
Kudos to Cakebread and Flora Springs!
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