2017 Bevan Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Tench Vineyard The Calixtro Oakville 750 ml

Napa Valley cult Cabernets make up an exclusive club. Russell Bevan is the crasher.

The 2017 Bevan Cellars Tench Vineyard The Calixtro Oakville is the one-of-a-kind winemaker’s latest Cabernet to shoulder aside some of the biggest names in Napa Valley. Sourced from one exquisite half-acre in the Oakville terroir that Screaming Eagle calls home, The Calixtro earned 98+ points from Jeb Dunnuck, a score that landed it at the top of the entire vintage—trailing just one wine (that costs $100 more) and ahead of cult standbys Realm and Carter. Those wines go for $395 and $650, if you can get them at all. 

Pour a sip of Bevan’s 100% Cabernet blockbuster into an oversized Bordeaux stem, and you instantly know you’re in the presence of something special. The opaque purple color pulls you into the glass, where intense aromas of black currant, cassis, violets, black tea, and pie spice aromas mingle. Super-dense but agile on the palate, it shows currant jam, mint, and loam, accented with toasted chocolate and vanilla from aging in new Darnajou and Taransaud barrels, and segues into the kind of concentrated, everlasting finish that’s a telltale of the absolute upper crust of Napa Cabernets. 

Dunnuck has touted Bevan wines as “guaranteed to put a smile on your face.” Cellar this one at a fraction of what its competitors cost, and you’ll be grinning before you even pop the cork. 

A decade ago, Robert Parker wrote of Russell Bevan: “I can’t recommend this up-and-coming producer’s wines highly enough.” Five years after that, he said “I continue to be blown away by the wines from Russell Bevan.” Now, with seven 100-pointers from Wine Advocate and another couple from Dunnuck, Bevan’s a constant presence at the top.

If anyone was going to barge into an exclusive world, it would be Bevan, with his NFL build and even bigger personality. The Sonoma County native spent a good chunk of his life in the Midwest, working outside of the wine industry but cultivating his palate by spending more on wine than on his mortgage, insurance, groceries, and every other living expense. When he headed back out West to fulfill his winemaking dream, he had the expertise and the attitude that breaking into the Cabernet elite would require.

Bevan sources from some of the top sites in Napa Valley, and Tench, located on the Oakville bench where the Vaca Range meets the valley floor, is one of his go-to vineyards. A direct neighbor to Screaming Eagle, Tench is composed of red, iron-rich, well-drained volcanic soil that has been weathered off the bedrock over thousands of years. Calixtro comes from the north half of Block 1B, which Bevan identified as special over multiple vintages: He’d taste through his cellar, and mark the barrels that had special, bright, red-fruit characteristics—barrels that turned out to be from this special plot. From then on, Bevan gave Block 1B its own bottling, and named it after a good friend. 

His instinct was right, considering that The Calixtro is now one of his top-rated wines vintage after vintage—which is saying something, considering the slew of 98-100 pointers in his portfolio. Today on Wine Access, you’ve got a chance to claim this best-in-class 2017 Cabernet for your cellar, at a fraction of the price of its cult competitors.