2023 Pilcrow Cabernet Sauvignon Granite Lake Vineyard Howell Mountain Napa Valley 750 ml

We've known Sara and Jonah Beer of Pilcrow since long before Decanter listed them alongside Dalla Valle, Larkmead, and Kapcsándy as one of Napa Valley's Top 10 producers. Now some of California's greatest wine programs pour their wines, including Auberge du Soleil, Lazy Bear, Quince, and Spago.

Pilcrow simply makes some of the best classically styled Napa Cabs we've ever tasted, and their 2023 Granite Lake Howell Mountain Cab is the finest yet—the exact kind of elegant, harmonious, ageworthy Cabernet that first won us over.

Sara and Jonah founded Pilcrow inspired by classics like Heitz, Spottswoode, and Diamond Creek, and this is a perfect example of their style. Sourced from a vineyard more than 2,000 feet above sea level, it's all about refined power and density: crushed blackberry, blackcurrant, and wild blueberry, layered with mountain sage, violet, graphite, and crushed rock. It has fine-grained mountain tannins that are beautifully composed now but will serve this wine well for the next two decades and more.

The 2023 arrived on the back of one of Napa's most celebrated growing seasons in recent memory—a long, cool, unhurried year that rewarded patience with freshness, purity, and finely etched structure. It's a vintage that plays directly to Pilcrow's strengths.

Sara and Jonah's reverence for the classics is evident in their treatment of the wine. They don't use extended macerations, micro-oxygenation, or heavy oak—nothing that masks the wine's terroir. The Granite Lake Cabernet comes from a site at the ridgeline of Howell Mountain, just over 2,000 feet up, heavy in iron and volcanic debris.

They aged the wine for 22 months in just 33% new French oak, a modest amount that allows the structure to remain predominantly fruit-based. The result is a Cabernet that promises to thrive in the cellar but develops beautifully in the glass when drunk young.