2017 Off the Cuff Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

“Have you ever heard the story about how Archimedes discovered the principle of displacement while taking a bath?”

We were on the phone with the Off the Cuff winemaker, trying to hide our impatience. His private label 2016 Off The Cuff Cabernet—the result of a literal off-the-cuff decision to invest every penny he had in a half-ton of rare grapes—had been a wild success. Sales were through the roof, with Wine Access member reviews streaming in, calling this outstanding value Cab a “must-buy.” 

Now we were the ones that had made an off-the-cuff call, pulling the trigger on some of the finest fruit in Napa when a split-second chance arose. And we needed the purchase to pay off big time. Our next call was to him, the gutsy genius behind Wine Access’s last spontaneous blockbuster. But the early samples he was supposed to have sent to our offices were late, and when we called to check in, he told us he was taking a bath. Good for the creative process, he said. Not good for our offer calendar, we thought

We held our tongues, stayed the course, and are so glad we did. This is a whopper of a Napa Cabernet, beautifully chiseled and darkly concentrated with a flashy ripe core of blackberry and plums, and plush accents of menthol and dark chocolate. Cashmere texture, with suave tannins coursing to a long, firm finish.

Many bottles from the 40-acre vineyard that called us up with a one-time offer go for around $285, earning 99- and 97-point scores from Robert Parker. We might have had to suffer through multiple rounds of “off the cuff” tweaks, as the winemaker experimented with various proportions and grapes. But the meticulously calibrated blend he landed on would make Michel Rolland proud, and blew us away. A Napa insider deal exclusively available to Wine Access, it’s $30 a bottle, and just as scarce as you would imagine at this astounding discount.

Pressed for an explanation, our winemaker told the story of how Archimedes had tied himself in knots trying to discover how to tell a gold crown from a fake one. It was only when his wife pushed him into a bath that he realized that displacement correlated to weight, and that the principle could be applied to distinguish heavier gold from lesser metals. This led, legend has it, to history’s first utterance of “Eureka!”

The puzzle the winemaker was tying himself in knots over wasn’t how to make a good wine—that was practically a given, working with fruit of such splendid quality, he said. The Bordeaux varieties from this historic vineyard, not far from Meadowood, ripen to perfection, giving up tiny, thin-skinned grapes with long-lived tannins. Robert Parker has described the vineyard owners as “visionaries.”

What our Off the Cuff friend was after was true greatness, and landing on the perfect proportion of Cabernet Sauvignon to Merlot, Petit Verdot to Malbec, out of the infinite possible varieties would require all his facilities. Hence the bath, to loosen the creative juices. “I’m waiting for my Eureka moment,” he told us.

We hung up wondering what we’d gotten ourselves into. But a few days later, just as we were beginning to lose hope, a call came in. “I’ve got it!” he exclaimed, reeling off numbers so fast we could hardly scribble them down. “76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 14% Merlot, 2% Cabernet Franc, 1% Merlot. Boy, just wait till you try it.”

When we tasted the sample, glistening purple to the edge in our glass, it was clear he really had cracked the code. This is plush and juicy in all the right places. It’s the kind of Napa Cabernet we want to pour with every course, and at just $30 for fruit that goes into wine that costs many times more, it’s a discovery worth absolutely exclaiming over.