Corrupt Review: Steven Kent Cabernet FrancMystery, Romance, and a Chance to Taste How Much Storage Vessels Matter
I was out to dinner in L.A. with Alinea chef Grant Achatz and his crew, including wine/hospitality genius Gary Obligacion. We blindfolded him, poured glasses of obscure wines, and asked him to guess what they were. This sounds sexier than it was. And it was pretty sexy. Three out of three times, Gary nailed the region, winery, and year, like a carny at the snobbiest carnival in the world. When we mixed a bunch of different wines into a glass, Gary got confused. He kept sniffing and stalling and eventually guessed that we poured a bunch of different wines into a glass. Then they blindfolded me. My challenge was to guess if the room-temperature wine was white or red. I was sure I’d get it wrong. I tasted it and immediately announced that it was red. There was clapping and backslapping and general Rudy-esque celebration. My palate isn’t great. That’s not the kind of thing that a wine writer should admit, but my goal here is less about explaining subtle notes and more about getting free wine. So when I received four wines from Steven Kent, all with the same cabernet franc juice inside, but aged in different vessels, I feared I wouldn’t taste the difference. But just like with the red/white challenge, I needed to find out.
Livermore, California, isn’t known for wine. It’s known for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is some kind of science place that I almost spent the summer after my junior year of high school at before the New Jersey Governor’s School saved me with a better offer. I might have chosen differently had I known there’s a lot of wine in Livermore. Before Prohibition, there were more than 50 wineries. Wente Vineyards has been here since it was established in 1883. But it’s in expensive East Bay suburbs, so the only grapes being grown are on the land that’s been legally reserved for agriculture.
“We can’t compete with Napa, no matter how good our wines are. Nobody really cares about Livermore,” Steven Mirassou told me. So he came up with a plan. The first part involved using his middle name, because his cousins own Mirassou Winery. Next was to convince all the Livermore wineries to focus on one grape, the one he loves the most, Cabernet Franc. “Every great wine region in the world has a very small basket of varieties that define it. Bordeaux has three, the Rhone has three,” Steven says. “Livermore grows like 40 grapes well. But that’s the shittiest marketing plan in the world, ‘We grow lots of things pretty well!’” So he went on a mission. In 2023, he started the annual CabFranc-a-Palooza on Memorial Day in Livermore, which now attracts more than 500 people. In 2025, the Livermore Valley wine region named cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc its signature grapes. Steven, who wrote a thesis on William Faulkner under his advisor, Harold Bloom, while getting a masters in literature at NYU, wrote a book, Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine, in which he rhapsodizes about Cabernet Franc:
No one goes home alone from CabFranc-a-Palooza.
I opened all four of the Elements bottles, which sell as a pack for $150. And even I could taste the difference. Steel tasted pure and direct; Rock a lot like Steel but a bit softer; Wood was round and luxurious and easy to drink. After those three, Elements, which carefully blended the three others, tasted like a slightly worse version of Wood. I really wanted to like Rock the best, since concrete is what cool winemakers are into. Or at least Steel so I could say that I love pure fruit. But I liked Wood. So did my wife Cassandra. It made me wonder if I should put everything I drink, including water, in a barrel for a few months. Steven made me feel better by assuring me that they used older, used up barrels that were pretty neutral. And that when he had 70 people vote after blind tasting, Wood won. But he likes Rock, and that’s the version of his Cab Franc he’s going to be selling to restaurants. He also made me feel better by saying that when he put the same wine in different vessels, he wasn’t sure they’d be different enough for a worthwhile experiment. I can assure him it was a great success. Not only do I now know how much of a difference a vessel makes, but far more importantly, that I’m capable of tasting the difference. You're currently a free subscriber to The Corrupt Wine Writer. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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