2023 Scarecrow Cabernet Sauvignon Rutherford 750 ml

Home to one of the greatest vineyards in the Napa Valley, Scarecrow is a true cult—built on a rare combination of ancient, dry-farmed vines and the winemaking of Celia Welch, one of the most acclaimed names in California Cabernet.

The story begins in the early 1940s, when J.J. Cohn—MGM’s longtime head of production, whose credits include The Wizard of Oz—bought a Rutherford parcel as a summer retreat for his family. In 1945, at the urging of his neighbor John Daniel Jr. of Inglenook, who promised to buy the fruit, Cohn planted Cabernet Sauvignon. He never intended to make wine himself, but those vines would become legendary.

Cohn bucked the trend, begun in the mid-1960s, of replacing St. George rootstock with the AxR#1 hybrid that later proved fatally vulnerable to phylloxera. His original plantings survived while most of old Napa was uprooted, and today they rank among the oldest Cabernet vines in the Valley. For decades this coveted fruit went into wines like Inglenook, Opus One, Duckhorn, and Joseph Phelps Insignia; the family sold every grape until 2002, and the first Scarecrow followed in 2003.

The wine draws its core from those first-planted vines—roughly 400 of the 1945 originals still remain—supplemented by younger plantings grown from the estate’s own proprietary clone. The vineyard is dry-farmed, which Welch credits for the wine’s intensity and its vivid expression of each vintage. She tastes the old vines and marks them for harvest individually, block by block, and each parcel is fermented separately before the wine is bottled without fining or filtration. Scarecrow remains one of Napa’s most coveted and tightly allocated cult Cabernets, released largely to a waiting list.

The 2023 growing season was one of the longest and coolest in a decade—Welch called it “the antithesis of 2022,” with conditions she likened to the era before 1991. An extended, gentle ripening gave the Cabernet freshness, purity, and deep color alongside fine-grained tannins, and the Valley has hailed it as a modern classic.

In the glass, the 2023 is all Rutherford power and elegance: a dense, dark core of mulberry, blackcurrant, and cherry, fragrant violets, licorice, and a whisper of tobacco, with toasty spice, dark chocolate, and cinnamon building to well-knit tannins and a long finish. It is opulent without a trace of heaviness—a Napa legend worth laying down for a generation.