2023 Dalla Valle Vineyards Maya Napa Valley 750 ml

Like Lamborghinis and Birkin bags, certain Napa Valley wines—many of them truly great—have effectively become trophies. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just what happens when a wine’s mix of price, rarity, and prestige starts attracting buyers who are more into status than sublimity.

It’s in that climate that Dalla Valle’s Maya stands apart. A first-tier Napa Valley collectible that enjoys near-unanimous acclaim from the world’s greatest critics and collectors, it still exists as a bit of a secret handshake among the most knowledgeable and refined palates in the wine world. It’s a soul-stirring wine—one we’ve sipped and savored only with connoisseurs whose taste we hold in the highest regard.

Napa Valley wines can certainly cost more than Maya. But they don’t get better. And the 2023 makes that case about as emphatically as any vintage in memory—a wine the critics placed within a whisper of perfection.

Maya is perhaps Napa Valley’s most famous blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Grown on Dalla Valle’s world-class terroir and ushered to the bottle by Maya (the winemaker) with the expert input of Napa legend Andy Erickson and internationally renowned consultant Michel Rolland, it’s a bottle that belongs in the greatest collections in the world.

Dalla Valle crafts some of the most coveted wines in the country. Aside from a handful of top restaurants such as PRESS in St. Helena, members of the mailing list claim almost all of each new release.

The winery’s stature is inversely proportional to its size—just 20 planted acres, in Oakville’s famed eastern hills. The vineyard, tended with the care of a Bordeaux First Growth, has been farmed organically since 2007. As of 2019, biodynamic has been the rule at Dalla Valle.

The Maya bottling first appeared in 1988, when Maya Dalla Valle, daughter of founders Gustav and Naoko Dalla Valle, was about a year old; she’s been the winemaker since 2021. Her namesake wine has always been an outlier in the land of cult Cabernets, leaning on a hefty proportion of Cabernet Franc—a grape that’s finally getting its due in Napa Valley. The 2023 returns to classic Maya proportions, with 67% Cabernet Sauvignon and 33% Cabernet Franc grown primarily on Dalla Valle’s “Maya’s Vineyard.”

The 2023 vintage has been hailed as one of Napa’s finest in a generation—a long, cool, even growing season that Maya has described as the first since 2019 without weather constraints. Aged for 23 months in 75% new French oak alongside amphora, this is a gorgeous edition of one of Napa Valley’s most celebrated wines.