2016 Playground Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon St Helena Napa Valley 750 ml

When St. Helena is Your Playground

The first time we tasted this gem was with a small group of friends at the Oxbow Public Market. It was a warm evening in downtown Napa, the breeze just starting to rustle the umbrellas outside, and we decided to take a chance on a bottle of 2016 Playground Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon. The price was surprising—St. Helena Cab is typically $100 or more per bottle, and this one was less than half of that.

We were stunned to silence at the first sip: Mission plums and cherry-pie notes exploded from the glass, and crushed lilacs lent it all a filigreed sense of elegance. Since when was St. Helena Cab a value like this?

Since Playground Cellars owner and winemaker Joe White turned the system on its head. The concept is simple: Joe regularly has access to a rotating supply of small lots of fruit from some of the top growers in California. At Playground, he leverages his years of connections and know-how to produce artisanal wines from tucked-away spots in Napa, Sonoma, and Paso Robles that he himself loves to drink.

“I’m not locked into a contract with anyone, so every year I have a new opportunity to snag some great fruit…which makes it more exciting for us,” he explained to us recently.

But Joe’s connections don’t come out of thin air: He’s spent years honing his craft as assistant winemaker at Brown Estate, the highly regarded winery that racks up 90+ scores from Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator year after year. Under Joe’s watchful eye, Brown Family’s Cabernets and Zinfandels have earned the kind of critical praise and consumer adoration that most producers only dream of.

As a result, Joe is able to score top-notch fruit and rock-bottom prices which lets him do what he wants, making the label a true playground: “We want to share the wine, we want people to enjoy what we’ve found.”

The 2016 Playground Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon achieves that and then some: Its fruit and floral notes are in harmony and promise years of evolution in the cellar. This is a wine that expresses everything that makes St. Helena such a venerated part of Napa, as well as why Joe’s name has become synonymous with expressive, joyous wines like this one.

Playground’s high quality, however, comes at a steep price: Of the four barrels that Joe initially made—with his wife, sommelier Suzanne Berkley, helping with the blends—only three of them made it into the final blend. They literally sacrificed 25% of the total possible quantity in order to maintain quality. That’s how passionate they are about Playground Cellars. And compared to other world-class St. Helena Cabernets, this one is an incomprehensible steal. A bottle of 2016 Hall Cab runs around $60. The same vintage from Chappellet is close to $70, and a bottle of Bryant Family is pushing $850. You could buy more than two cases of Playground here for that amount! And truthfully, you might be tempted to.

That night at Oxbow, we committed to as many cases as we could find, and we can say with confidence that you’ll feel the same the moment you taste this dark, expressive Cabernet.