2023 Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

Eisele Vineyard epitomizes why single-vineyard wines exist: it offers a singular balance of elegance and power and stands alone in this corner of the Valley for sheer quality. It’s one of the most important vineyards in America, with one of its longest histories—wine grapes first went into the ground here in the 1880s. The wines from here, long bottled under the Araujo label, have been lighting up scoreboards for decades, and Jeb Dunnuck awarded the 2023 a perfect 100 points.

Milt and Barbara Eisele bought the site in 1969 and gave it their name. They had no ambition to make wine themselves; they grew the fruit and sold it to Napa’s best. Robert Mondavi took it first but wouldn’t put the Eisele name on the label, so the family looked elsewhere. In 1971, Ridge’s Paul Draper turned it into one of the first vineyard-designated Cabernets in California, and Conn Creek and Joseph Phelps soon followed.

When Bart and Daphne Araujo went hunting for a Napa property in 1990, their real estate agent—Jean Phillips, who would soon plant a little vineyard called Screaming Eagle—steered them here. The Araujos converted the farming first to organic, then to biodynamic. The team behind Château Latour was impressed enough to buy the whole estate in 2013, and it remains with the Pinault family’s Artémis Domaines.

The vineyard sits at the base of the Palisades just east of Calistoga, where alluvial volcanic soils fan out and drain hard. That means low yields and deeply concentrated fruit—the depth and weight, without the heaviness, that are Eisele hallmarks. Three-quarters of the estate is given to Cabernet Sauvignon, with Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot alongside.

The 2023 comes from what many are calling a vintage of a lifetime—one of the longest growing seasons in a decade, with a slow, patient ripening that locked in freshness. The wine dazzles with a deep purple-black hue, unveiling violet, rose, and kirsch alongside boysenberry and cassis. Medium to full-bodied and confidently structured, its firm, fine-grained tannins and bright acidity frame layers of black and red fruit that close long on a stony, mineral finish.

All that is noble—dare we say Grand Cru—about Eisele Vineyard is in this bottle.