Once upon a time, much of the wine reviewing I did here on Vinography consisted of individual bottles—tasted, described, written up in long form. As time went on, however, the number of bottles arriving at my doorstep multiplied exponentially, and I ended up attending more large tastings and spending time visiting producers who always have a bunch of wines to be tasted and reviewed. So those individual bottle articles fell by the wayside. I think it’s literally been more than a decade since I’ve written a blog post about a singular bottle of wine.
Never say never, however.
Today, I’m writing about just one wine. A wine that is one of the most impressive new release wines I’ve tasted from Napa in some time. Not to give away the punchline too early—but it’s a wine that I’m rating 10 out of 10 on my personal wine rating scale. It’s an enormously impressive wine, from a producer that travels in the company of those who are still sometimes described as Napa “cult wines” but that somehow sits outside the frothy and flashy marketplace of status-focused bottles.
Gem of An Estate
Tucked back up off of Oakville Grade, in the shadow of a hillside owned by Harlan Estate, 40 acres of land that used to be Oakford Vineyards went up for sale in the mid-1990s. A good friend of Tom Futo asked him if he’d be interested in going in on the property in a joint venture, but Futo had been a successful businessman long enough to avoid the temptation of a business partnership with a friend. And it was a temptation—a jewel-like property with 13 acres of neglected hillside vineyards in some of Napa’s most storied terroir. But Futo declined, and his friend ended up buying the property on his own…