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Vine Hill Ranch is a truly iconic Cabernet: a modern cult wine, an estate-grown wine with a real sense of place, the culmination of the Phillips family’s evolution from grapegrowing to winemaking over three generations. They’ve earned a real understanding of terroir through years of traversing the vineyard rows and tending the seven blocks by hand.
Winemaker Françoise Peschon’s approach to winemaking is to proceed with a minimal, gentle touch. Harvested in late September at optimal ripeness, grapes are hand-sorted, cold-soaked, and fermented by native yeast by vineyard lot. Following extended maceration, the wine ages in new French oak for eight months before it is blended and returned to barrel for one year prior to release.
Strikingly perfumed, intense yet lifted, it showcases the elegance, balance, and maturity of fruit from this unique benchland vineyard in southwestern Oakville. Lifted by a vein of minerality and bright acidity, the opulent palate imparts a complexity and lasting purity through a remarkably long finish.
“Fresh, enticing aromas of sappy red and black fruits, leather, sandalwood, cassis, violets and sweet cedar. Gorgeous on entry, brimming with elegance in its finely delineated fruit notes that lead with blackberry, and black cherry morphing into tangy red fruit and currants. Featherweight fine-grained tannins are almost powdery; a wealth of savoury mineral character floods the mid-palate like liquified granite. And it keeps giving, revealing wild herbs, sagebrush, bittersweet chocolate and brown spices. One of the more elegant 2019 Napa Cabs in this concentrated, dark-fruited vintage, with beautiful structure and a freshness that remains present in every single sip.”
100 points, Jonathan Cristaldi, Decanter, June 2022Â
“Just bottled, the 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon tastes like a barrel sample, such is its purity of fruit and lushness! It is the most overt, opulent young wine I have ever tasted here, and likely to require a number of years in bottle for some of the baby fat to melt away. Pliant and supple, with soft contours and tons of fruit, the 2019 is simply magnificent. I imagine the more savoury, earthy notes that are so typical of VHR will develop in time. Even today, though, the 2019 is outrageously beautiful. 2027-2039.”
98+ points, Antonio Galloni. vinous.com, Jan 2022
