Leave Caymus Alooooone!

Caymus Cabenet Sauvignon may be the best known fine wine in the United States. It is ubiquitous on pricey restaurant wine lists and, for many wine lovers, it is the paradigm of a special occasion wine.

But as Clay Dillow in VinePair comprehensively details, it is loathed by the wine elite. Rich, round, plush, and drenched in sweet fruit, it is what fine wine used to be before the somms and wine writers decided wine should be crunchy and tart. Drinking Caymus is like listening to Fleetwood Mac. You can understand why they were loved but haven’t we moved on from that?

Indeed we have. The wine world operates on difference and variation. That is what makes wine interesting and Caymus isn’t that. Each vintage tastes like the last and it represents a style of winemaking that was trendy in 1985. It’s not only old-fashioned but represents the high-alcohol, additive-filled, over-oaked beast, hatred of which is now the calling card for anyone who wants to be taken seriously in wine.

However, the other side of the coin is that Caymus is relatively affordable, as Napa Cabernet goes, and it is familiar and consistent.

“It makes sense why people come to that wine early,” says Brahm Callahan, master sommelier and CEO of wine-focused venture capital fund Faucet. “It’s big, it’s forward, it has a lot of generosity, it’s approachable, and also it’s everywhere. It’s not like some gray ghost/unicorn that you can only find in the storybooks sommeliers read to themselves at night. It’s an actual product consumers can buy.”

They sell hundreds of thousands of cases per year. They are doing something right.

But popularity aside, what can be said about Caymus from an aesthetic point of view? The critics are not wrong but they are missing something important. No aesthetic community should forget its past. We can’t orient ourselves in the present without knowing where we came from. We can’t really understand low intervention winemaking without understanding the context in which it became something to celebrate.

People who stay abreast of developments in music may not compulsively listen to Fleetwood Mac. But few think they should be written out of the canon or avoided entirely. And truth be told, on occasion I enjoy sipping a big, blowsy Cabernet while listening to Go Your Own Way.

Someday “crunchy and tart” will be out of favor. Remember, wine is about variation. Big Cabernets will come back in style along with parachute pants and ankle boots. And when they do Caymus will still be selling 200,000 cases per year.