2010 Romeo Vineyards & Cellars Red Wine Sempre Vive Miscela Napa Valley 750 ml

Great Napa Cabernet is usually a waiting game, built to age and best rewarded by patience. The 2010 Sempre Vive “Miscela” offers a rare shortcut: a Cabernet-based blend that already carries a decade and a half of bottle age.

It comes from Romeo Vineyards, a small family estate tucked onto a wooded knoll just south of Calistoga. Frank Romeo and his wife, Eugenia—known to everyone as Gena—went looking for a weekend escape from the Bay Area in 1996 and came home with a neglected 40-acre parcel instead.

What sold them wasn't the vineyard, which was tangled and overgrown, but the land: a rare little knoll rising off the valley floor, crowned with old-growth woods and alive with deer, hawks, and herons. They named the estate Blue Heron, after a heron a poacher had killed while they were still negotiating for the property. A pair of herons lives there to this day.

Buried in that neglected vineyard was treasure—Cabernet vines planted in the early 1970s, some of the oldest in all of Napa, where vines are usually pulled long before they reach 30. The Romeos nursed the survivors back, propagated their own clone from them, and replanted the rest to Bordeaux varieties.

Fruit this good doesn't stay secret. For years, some of it went into the wines of one of Calistoga's most storied neighbors, Chateau Montelena, before the Romeos began keeping it for themselves.

The Sempre Vive wines—the name means “always alive”—have been made since the early 2000s by Alison Green Doran, a protégé of the legendary André Tchelistcheff and one of the first women to make wine in California. “Miscela” is simply the Italian word for blend. Hers is Calistoga through and through: old-vine Cabernet filled in with Malbec and Petit Verdot, grown where hot days and cool nights stretch the season and pack the fruit with color and depth.