2017 Radio Silence Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley is sold out.

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The Stags Leap Coup of the Century

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    2017 Radio Silence Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

    Sold Out

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    • Curated by unrivaled experts
    • Choose your delivery date
    • Temperature controlled shipping options
    • Get credited back if a wine fails to impress

    Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds of Silence

    Quite a few interesting things happened in 1952. Elizabeth II was named the Queen of England, and the first hydrogen bomb was tested at the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean—rather noisy affairs. But then a quiet thing happened. Pianist David Tudor walked on stage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, sat in front of a grand piano, took out a stopwatch, and closed the lid.

    Tudor sat there for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a single note. By the time he raised the piano lid to take a bow, members of the audience were losing it. The piece was “The Roaring Silence,” by composer John Cage. Silence, Cage posited, is in actuality bursting with sound. On that note, great wine leads to a kind of drop-dead silence all its own, doesn’t it? 

    We’re quietly thrilled to share the 2017 Radio Silence Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. The reasons are many. Like the many, many pages of an NDA we signed about the grape source for this positively monumental Cabernet. While the winery will maintain radio silence, we can tell you it is the very definition of a critical darling. Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate has bestowed at least 45 scores hitting 95 and above, and nearly ten wines have earned 100-point scores. As for the price of the source winery? Their bottles start at $150, rise to $600, and climb to $1,000 per bottle at auction.

    The price of our rendition will leave you speechless: The 2017 Radio Silence starts at $45 a bottle cascading, like a piano glissando, down to $38 each on cases.  

    There’s an abundance of superlatives describing the source winery’s wines: “absolute stunner,” “epic length,” and “many, many layers,” of “singular,” “absolutely compelling” wines that deliver “unbelievable fruit on the attack.” One notable critic even found such intensity, depth and richness, it inspired an incredible comparison (one we wish we had come up with): suggesting that it was like a First Growth only on “steroids.”

    As for our version, we took 79% Cabernet Sauvignon and married it with 7% Petite Sirah, 7% Charbono, 4% Zinfandel, 2% Merlot, and 1% Petit Verdot, blended and aged on our watch in one-quarter new French oak for 24 months. Showing a deep crimson-purple hue in the glass and delivering incredibly fresh aromas of red and black macerated fruits, with tantalizing cedar oak spices underscored by crushed red rock minerality. This wine moves from ripe red fruit to black cherry and blueberry on the palate before a wave of spicy secondary notes—tobacco, red florals, cedar spices—arrives, carrying the wine to its mineral-driven finish.

    All that minerality. Millions of years ago, volcanic eruptions shaped the Vaca Mountain range in Napa, and millions of years of erosion have resulted in the jagged peaks and outcroppings we see today in the Stags Leap District, an area stretching a mile wide and three miles in length, sliced in half by the Silverado Trail. The rolling foothills are teeming with the sediment and volcanic debris that have settled over millennia, and the vines planted in these harsh, rocky, well-draining soils have produced some of the most profound wines in all of California’s rich winemaking history—like the 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet that stole the show at the Judgement of Paris tasting. 

    The vines that produced today’s 2017 Radio Silence… well, all we can say is they have a view of those Stag’s Leap vines (and a great view at that!). It’s a good bet that in about the same amount of time as Cage’s piece, roughly four-and-a-half minutes from now, now that you’ve reached the end of this missive, you’ll be seeing “Sold Out.” So, don’t lose it (like the audience did in Woodstock). Tune that radio to “Silence” while you think—and act—fast.