Do the wines of Napa share the characteristic of so many of the world’s greatest wines, namely the ability to improve over the decades? And if they do, is this equally true for contemporary releases as it is for historical bottlings?

Over the course of two days last week, in the company of Anthony Dias Blue, Karen MacNeil, and Sotheby’s wine specialist Nicholas Jackson, I had the good fortune and great pleasure to guide 35 interested wine lovers through a truly historic tasting of wines from California’s Napa Valley. The premise was as simple as it was literal: assemble 80 examples of Napa’s most legendary wines from past and present for a comparative and retrospective tasting.

While the truly definitive list of the legends of Napa could easily fuel hours worth of debate between even the most knowledgeable California wine experts, there is little doubt that the 80 wines assembled for our tasting, as part of the 2012 Flavor! Napa Valley food and wine celebration, were definitively representative of Napa’s most glorious past and present.

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