2018 La Pelle Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve Napa Valley 750 ml

Maayan Koschitzky is one of California’s most revered Cabernet craftsmen: The 100-point winemaker has made wines for Dalla Valle and Lail, and was selected by Philippe Melka to be Director of Winemaking at Atelier Melka—a position for which Melka could have had his pick of just about any winemaker in the world. 

At Atelier Melka, Maayan has had a hand in some of the rarest and most collectible Cabernets in Napa Valley. When word got out that he would be launching his own label with the team behind some of the Valley’s top terroirs, every wine professional and collector we knew was sure that something huge was on the horizon. 

When the wines were released, they managed to do the impossible: They outperformed our expectations.

We’re extremely lucky to have an allocation of Maayan’s 2018 La Pelle Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve Napa Valley. A masterpiece of which only 150 cases were made, Jeb Dunnuck lauded it as a “magical wine” in his 97-point review, which put it alongside $375 Fairchild and $245 Alpha Omega. There’s no doubt that this bottle belongs with the greatest Cabernets in your cellar, where it will thrive for the next 20 years. 

The Reserve is La Pelle’s flagship, representing the very best Cabernet that Maayan and his partners—Pete Richmond and Miguel Luna of the renowned Silverado Farming Co.—can achieve. In the flawless 2018 vintage, that meant blending barrels from three stellar sites: The Alluvium Vineyard in St. Helena, a dry-farmed old-vine site, brings black fruit and sweet tannins to the wine. The Ceniza Vineyard in Coombsville contributes depth, density, and spice, while Cabernet from the Red Hen Vineyard in Oak Knoll lifts the aromatics.

The marriage of these three sites is absolutely stunning. Purple and dense in color, the 2018 Reserve bursts open with impressive aromas of blackberries, black currants, and crème de cassis, the lush fruit accented with violets, sweet baking spices, minerals, and graphite. The wine is full-bodied and lush on the palate, showing incredible concentration and depth all the way through the lingering, seamless finish. 

If you’re in Napa Valley, you can find the Reserve on the list at PRESS (where it will cost you over $300), but 90% of it goes directly to La Pelle’s mailing list. Because of the long relationship we’ve enjoyed with Maayan, we’ve got an allocation for our Wine Access Cabernet collectors—but it’s barely a sliver of the already-miniscule production.

After selecting the barrels for the 2018 Reserve, Maayan treated the wine to an extra-painstaking regimen, aging it for 21 months total in 80% new French oak barrels, then letting it rest for another eight months in bottle. The result is a wine that eclipses the huge expectations that the entire Napa Valley set for La Pelle, and one that will fit in with the very best wines in your collection.