I was talking to Daniel Daou of DAOU Family Wines the other day and he echoed the opinion of many wine collectors who believe Napa Valley’s red wines don’t have a lot of respect abroad.

“Asians and Europeans don’t like California wines – that’s a fact,” Daniel said, “because California wines don’t cut through the acidity of food. Jammy wines don’t do that.”

Daou scoured the country in search of the calcereous soil that is found in Bordeaux. The only place in California where he found it was the Adelaide district of western Paso Robles. There he launched DAOU with his brother. He even named the mountain after the family name.

Alas, Daou struck a nerve. The wines I typically see from California are too extracted, high in alcohol and short of acidity. They are fruit bombs better served as dessert Daou’s Soul of the Lion, named after his father, is balanced. A Bordeaux-style blend, it stood out in a flight of California wines — mostly from Napa Valley — that I recently tasted blind with a couple of fellow oenophiles. With many of these wines well over $100 a bottle, it is more reasonable to enjoy a cru bourgeois from Bordeaux for a fraction of the price.

Napa’s extracted style began in the mid 1980s when wine critic Robert Parker was awarding this type of wine with high scores. If you taste any wines from, say, Chateau Montelena or Beaulieu Vineyards from earlier vintages, you will find more balanced and long-lived wines — wines that fared well in a blind tasting with the best of Bordeaux in the famous 2006 Judgement of Paris wine competition.

We’ve tasted some cabernet sauvignons back to the 1970s. I suspect the same wines made in the last two decades won’t have the staying power. On the other hand, I recently tasted a 1975 Mouton Rothschild and a 1975 Chateau Trotanoy that were showing quite well even though neither vintage was very good in Bordeaux. It proves that a good producer can make a decent wine in even a poor vintage.