2023 Good Decisions Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

We were in very productive talks with the small St. Helena winery behind this smoking hot NDA release.

Then the 2023 vintage descended from the heavens like a winemaker’s fantasy of finesse, precision, and energy.

We’d already been talking in depth before a delayed mid-April budbreak gave way to June’s magical fruit set, portending a season of long, refined ripening and an autumn even the Bordelais would envy. And with serious alacrity—as the whispers around 2023 began in earnest, with winemakers daring to acknowledge they had a genuinely grand, historically great crop on their hands—we inked the details of today’s offer. 

There was no way we were going to let a deal as miraculous as this one get away.

Only then, breathing a deep sigh of relief, could we look back and say: That was a @%&$ing good decision. Because if, as Lisa Perrotti-Brown’s The Wine Independent has declared, 2023 is a “once-in-a-lifetime vintage”—then this is one bargain that will certainly be tough to beat.

Its source is a family-run estate that shares a terroir with Hundred Acre’s Ark Vineyard—which produces 100-point Cabs for $750. Jeb Dunnuck has compared our partner estate’s wines to the elegance of Saint-Émilion’s Château Figeac, and called them “ageworthy” and “impeccably made.” Prices usually range from $140 to well over $350.

Though the vineyard is small, it encompasses a range of terroir, from deep loam to volcanic ash, with occasional flecks of black obsidian from the nearby Glass Mountain. And because the winery vinifies their vineyard separately into approximately 14 blocks, their small-lot winemaking lends itself to splitting off a portion for one-time, one-off deals like this one.