Jonathan Cristaldi: my top fine wines of 2022

It’s no exaggeration to say that in 2022, the majority of wines I sampled – and many that I drank and enjoyed – were Napa Cabernets.

Looking back over my notes during the months compiling the 2019 Napa Cabernet vintage report, I spent valuable time tasting with several of Napa’s top winemaking talents.

I spent time with Jean Hoefliger, Nigel Kinsman, Thomas Rivers Brown, Atelier Melka’s Maayan Koschitzky, consultant winemaker Julien Fayard, Harlan’s Cory Empting and Bob Levy, just to name a few.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for Jonathan’s top fine wines of 2022

My top wines from that report are out in the world.

In February, I sampled Kosta Browne’s groundbreaking Burgundy project and wrote an exclusive for Decanter.

In March, I wound up at Beaulieu Vineyard thanks to Gary Rieschel, whose Auction Napa Valley winning bid unlocked the doors to a weekend of drinking—not sampling—Georges de Latour Cabernet bottles dating back to 1967.

In May, vintner Tor Kenward of TOR treated a small gathering at Wheeler Farms in Saint Helena to wines from his cellar: a 1945 Beringer Red that, topped up in 1993, tasted of dark fruit, tobacco, walnuts, raisins and was salty and briny and quite alive! A 1974 Heitz Napa Valley was remarkable, and Tor claimed it was a Martha’s Vineyard bottling, but ‘they ran out of labels,’ he said. It was all cured meat, tobacco, black olive, and liquorice.

Beyond Napa

So many of these tastings and bottles should qualify as my year’s top wines. But I’ve focused on my favourite producers, most consumed at home in Novato in the San Francisco Bay Area, mere miles from the Sonoma County border.

I love Sonoma wines. I can’t get enough of Benovia, Three Sticks, Merry Edwards, and Convene (Dan Kosta’s new project). My adoration for California wine extends south into Santa Barbara, the Santa Ynez Valley, and Sta. Rita Hills.

I drained many bottles of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah from Dragonette Cellars and Liquid Farm—pleading at times for bottles of Liquid Farm’s Champagne—a collaboration with Pertois-Moriset in Le Mesnil-sur-Ogier.

But my standout wine of the year was a 2012 Matthiasson Napa Valley Red enjoyed at a home in St. Helena. While the winery’s Claret-like, elegant, age-worthy reds show restraint in their youth, winemaker Steve Matthiasson’s focus on early picks and higher natural acidities means the wines age beautifully. At ten years of age, this 2012 is finally moving from restraint to a veritable fireworks show.

Finding focus

Above all, 2022 was a year to recalibrate and find focus in wine writing. I would be remiss not to express my gratitude to the talented editorial team at Decanter for all their support and honouring me with the responsibility of becoming Decanter’s Napa correspondent.

From what I’ve seen and tasted living in the San Francisco Bay Area these past seven years, Napa’s light – and the light from around California’s wine regions – is burning brighter by the hour. The early power brokers who have shaped it are now fine-tuning it. Its aura is a seductive siren calling for a battery of new onlookers, chroniclers, vintners, and hospitality mavens, all looking for a piece of the action – some for better, some for worse.

Whatever the near future holds, that California light is shining bright. I carried it with me on a recent visit to the east coast to see Chris Bischoff, an old New York City friend who has planted vines on a steep hillside in New York State’s Upper Hudson Valley.

From his cabin in Cambridge, New York, peering out a bay window, we could see the vines he’d planted five years earlier and vast swaths of rolling hills beyond them. I brought a bottle of Jesse Katz’s 2018 Devil Proof Malbec from the Alexander Valley – talk about rays of light.

We talked for hours about this doppelgänger of a wine and its effusive neon beams of structure. It seemed to morph minute by minute in the glass as Bischoff, and I tracked the setting sun over shapely hills, themselves changing colours, their shapes shifting as nightfall draped each snow-covered hilly crest in new angles and forms.

As Katz is fond of saying, ‘Live well, drink well, and the devil can’t get ya.’

Jonathan’s top wines of 2022

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