2022 Meadowcroft Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

Head out of Opus One’s south side and turn left onto Oakville Cross Road.

That’s it. Those are the directions to the secret source behind the 2022 Meadowcroft Napa Cabernet, a site so close to Opus that you’d feel silly taking a car. A bike might even be overkill. Hit Silver Oak, you’ve gone too far.

Needless to say, this stretch of Oakville is some of the most expensive real estate in all of Napa Valley, famous for its muscular Cabernet nearly as long as the region has been famous for wine. To make any wine from the neighborhood requires some serious negotiation. To sell it under $100? This far under $100? 

Tom Meadowcroft is clearly some sort of warlock.

Or at least that’s what we’d believe if we hadn’t offered a string of exceptional values from him over the years—wines that always seem to defy expectations for their terroir and the quality of what’s in the bottle. So we’ll just call this one of Tom’s biggest home runs ever. It’s a towering shot off the upper-deck.

In the 2022 vintage, Napa was blessed with a warm—if lower yielding—growing season. Those modest yields were the result of small berries, which in turn produced concentrated wines. Decanter noted that “winemakers across the board appear to be delighted” with the quality of the fruit they harvested.

From those conditions come this brilliant bottle, which takes plenty of sun-kissed black cherry and plum fruit, adds a layer of cassis, and then accents the lot with hints of dark chocolate and minerality. It’s delicious today, but we’re going to keep popping bottles well into the 2030s.