The best Californian wines to buy now

At a reception at Wild by Tart in London last month I was able to take my pick from 40 different top California wines. They were grouped by style and/or reputation, and at one of the six or seven tables, for example, was Opus One 2018, Harlan Estate 2016, Bond St Eden 2016, Colgin IX 2016, Eisele Vineyard 2014 and Ridge Monte Bello 2011. The Chardonnay table offered the delights of Kistler, Les Noisetiers 2019, Kongsgaard 2019 and Ramey, Woolsey Road 2018.

I hope that any fellow fan of California wine appreciates just what a great opportunity this was. There were many old friends there in human form, but I mainly ignored them, I’m afraid, in favour of the old friends in bottles. After all, I have ample opportunity to chat to my fellow wine professionals, but in Britain we see top-quality California wine all too rarely.

The occasion was the launch of Edition 1 of The California List, an idea dreamt up by Damien Jackman and Justine McGovern, who are responsible for the generic promotion of California wine in the UK. It is a list of the California wine producers who, on the basis of their quality and profile, are the most important in Britain. Jackman and McGovern reasoned that such classifications, such as the famous one of Bordeaux in 1855, help to highlight the best producers and guide potential purchasers.

To come up with this list of 51 top California producers (not individual wines) of relevance to the UK market, they asked five of us to adjudicate. Wine writer Stephen Brook; California buyer for The Wine Society Sarah Knowles; Mark Andrew of Noble Rot; Master Sommelier Ronan Sayburn of 67 Pall Mall and I were chosen because we share a particular affection for California wine.

In October 2020, we were sent a list of 100 producers who export to the UK and we were urged to add to it as we saw fit. In the end, we considered closer to 200 candidates. We were asked to mark each producer on the basis of three criteria: wine quality (15 points), availability in the UK (five points) and the overall impact each producer has had in this country (a further five points). Then we all got together online for what the organisers described as “a robust Zoom discussion” to thrash out our final selection.

We weren’t given a total number to aim for and the extent to which we judges were left to make our own decisions is perhaps reflected in the total number of producers we chose. We just couldn’t agree on which name to exclude in order to round the final number down to 50. American readers may wonder why quite a few producers of great réclame in the US are missing. It was mostly because they don’t export to the UK, the most important export market for California wine by volume and second biggest by value, after Canada.

The organisers wanted to transform our selection into a fancy framed printout of the classification. Since they were determined to make this as sustainable as possible, they had it printed on a material made from recycled coffee cups — in dramatic gold on black — so it was not until the end of last month that the classification was finally revealed at the launch party at Wild by Tart.

I take my hat off to McGovern and Jackman for their exceptional devotion to sustainability. The day before the classification was unveiled, they also organised a giant showing at Smith & Wollensky in London of 280 more modest California wines currently available in the UK. And with a decidedly sustainable twist.

For the first time at a professional wine tasting, as far as I know, they included the weights of each full bottle in the tasting list, highlighting some of the most egregiously heavy bottles that will have especially heavy carbon footprints. Black mark to DAOU whose Cabernets each come in a bottle weighing 1,814g when full. Praise to Tablas Creek for their Esprit de Tablas whose full bottle weighs just 1,110g.

As well as this, Jackman and McGovern dispensed with the sort of printed tasting booklets that are often wasted. Instead, they provided masses of information digitally via QR codes. The wines were also presented, within their categories, in price order — a surprisingly unusual and useful way of doing things.

An Edition 2 of The California List is planned for 2024 and I hope that some of the producers whose wines showed well in the bigger tasting will find their way on to it. There are now so many new wave producers in California taking advantage of regions and grapes less expensive than the most famous ones that they can provide real value — quite a contrast to stereotypical Napa Cabernet.

On the morning after the launch of The California List, Sarah Knowles detailed her latest discoveries in an online presentation of new wines by The Wine Society’s buyers to wine writers. She admitted that it is difficult to find interesting California wines that could be sold in the UK for less than £10 a bottle, “but at £10 to £15 there are wines I believe can really go head to head with wines at the same price from elsewhere”, she said, citing family companies such as Cline, McManus and Pedroncelli who own their own vineyards, and can therefore control their own costs and “bring something different to the table”.

The main thing I’m happy about is that there seems, at last, to be a real will to get interesting California wine — not just the inexpensive, high-volume brands — into the glasses of non-Americans.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. More stockists from Wine-searcher.com

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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