2019 Good Decisions Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

This is one of our favorite NDA Cabernets from 2019. Forward, ripe, and juicy, showing incredible breadth and depth, it’s effortlessly easy to fall in love with.

The source estate is a tiny operation run by a massively talented husband-and-wife team. The husband trained with 100-point megastar winemakers Philippe Melka and Thomas Rivers Brown, adopting their go-for-broke chase for perfection in his own vineyard and cellar. The couple strives to make the best wine humanly possible—and only then do they turn to the business side.

In 2018, their auteur mindset resulted in a mere 300 cases of Cabernet, but over the wild next two years, they had trouble selling all of them. For the 2019 vintage, we encouraged them to hedge their bets a bit: bottle half their production under their boutique label—and we’ll take the rest.  

We’ve released two previous Good Decisions wines, both appellation-focused—one from St. Helena, one from Howell Mountain—and both garnered huge ratings from members. We wanted the next in the series to be a benchmark statement about Napa, a wine we could get behind and say: This is how good under-$40 Cabernet from California’s most expensive wine region can be, if you have the right connections.

We met the couple behind the 2019 Good Decisions at an intimate dinner event, where we tasted their yet-to-be-bottled Cab out of an unlabeled bottle. Once we chatted them up, we started thinking about our next Good Decisions bottling—and by the end of the night, we were well on our way to scoring a killer Cabernet that tastes like it should cost WAY more than we’re charging.