For John Keats the fall was “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” and it was these words that came to mind as I savored this wonderful Five Star Nick’s Wine of the Week, the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon 2001 ($98)

It’s all mellow elegance, a beguiling combination of ripe, dusty fruits, a miracle of concentration and complexity. Its “mists,” if you will, are evocative of those hints of intriguing, half-hidden mystery that all great red wines offer, that sense that you’re never quite going to understand all that is going on in the glass.

Most wine consumers don’t think about bottle-aging American wine, even great American wine. And to be quite frank, when you consider how completely lacking in anything resembling structure so many of them are, it’s easy to see why. In fairness to the producers, they are, for the most part, just responding to the demands of a public new to the world of wine when they release the sort of soft, fleshy, easy-drinking and completely unchallenging wines that sell so well.

The consumer in turn equates smoothness with quality. And in the process entirely misses out on the complex wonders offered by a great cabernet sauvignon with a few years of bottle age like this.

Warren Winiarski

Stag’s Leap was owned until recently by the renowned Napa pioneer, Warren Winiarski, a man who quite literally changed both the face and the politics of American wine. In 1970 he bought an old prune orchard and replanted it to vines. It was this vineyard that produced the Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon that won the 1976 wine competition, the so-called “Judgment of Paris,” that put American winemaking on the map. It is also the vineyard that’s now known as S.L.V.

It’s too bad poor Keats didn’t live long enough – and he certainly didn’t live very long – to enjoy this wine. On a practical level, the 2001 S.L.V. is available from a variety of wine shops on wine-searcher.com for an average price that’s less than the cost of the current release. So you’re not even paying extra to experience the wonders of enjoying a great cab at its peak of maturity.

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