2016 Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon Alexander Valley 750 ml

The 2016 season earned 98 points from Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, making it one of the greatest ever for California Cabernet, which means there's never been a better vintage of iconic Silver Oak to add to your collection.

Silver Oak has helped drive American interest in fine wine since the 1970s—a fact that can help explain their ascent, but doesn’t scratch the surface of what has kept Silver Oak at the top for nearly 50 years. For that, we can thank the Duncans’ far-sighted dedication to quality, which begins long before the first drop of Cabernet hits one of their custom American oak barrels.  

“Our real push for nearly 15 years has been in a philosophy of precision viticulture,” third-generation vintner Matt Duncan told us when we caught up over the phone. Since 2006, Silver Oak has worked with a company called Fruition Sciences. “It has opened up this whole new avenue in how we think of vine vigor, water, and canopy management,” Matt said about the partner whose services are also tapped by OVID Napa Valley and Colgin, California icon Ridge, and Bordeaux First Growth Château Latour.

“Irrigation and water were the biggest,” Matt said, referring to the changes that working with Fruition brought about. “The biggest thing you can do in California is how you irrigate.” More than a decade ago, one of Matt’s first jobs at Silver Oak was to help measure the vines’ water needs in the early hours of each day (which often included nights, he’s quick to point out) using a traditional “pressure bomb.” The piece of equipment squeezes sap from a sample leaf to measure the water potential of a plant.

Since then, the vineyard team has recalibrated and implemented new technology—like sap-flow sensors that provide real-time data. This allows the team to time irrigations more accurately, which reduces water use and improves wine quality. 

The Fruition technology that Matt calls the “game-changer” is called the physiocap. Just before winter pruning, Silver Oak leaves two feet of growth on the vines. Then, they run the physiocap through each row, measuring both shoot diameter and the number of shoots per vine.  The result is a vigor map of the harvest, which helps identify patterns from the harvest that recently concluded and provides historical context available for the vineyard’s lifespan.

“It’s an amazing tool, and we can only do it once a year,” Matt said of the machine that shows them how their vineyard choices panned out. “Were your watering decisions right? Did you over- or under-water? Was our pruning accurate enough to address the variability within a certain block? Is there an area that is chronically weak or strong? All these things combined drive our replanting decisions.” A wise replanting plan is invaluable for perpetuating the kind of quality that Silver Oak is known for—the family's replanting plan for their 400 acres of grapes reaches 24 years into the future. 

Silver Oak is a decade into these measures, and their 2016 Alexander Valley Cabernet shows off the sparkling quality they’ve fostered, not to mention one of the greatest vintages ever in Northern California. 

“We have yet to make our best bottle of wine,” Matt often says. It’s the forward-looking Duncans’ mantra at Silver Oak, and it may be true—but it’ll be pretty tough to beat the outstanding 2016.