2023 Wolfe Grade Cabernet Sauvignon Mt. Veeder Napa Valley 750 ml

As a rule of thumb, the higher you go up a mountain, the more it costs to make a wine—and the more you pay for it. So no matter how many times you punch the numbers in, you’d never expect the price we have on this luscious 2023 Mt. Veeder Cabernet.

For the historic NDA-protected estate behind today’s Wolfe Grade release, working on decomposed granite slopes high above the fog line, wines are truly hand-made—and their release prices reflect that.

Singing with high-altitude clarity and freshness, muscled with dense mountain power, this exuberant black-fruit giant comes from an estate whose Cabs go for $105 minimum. That’s already a great value for an AVA that produces just 1% of Napa’s wines, and where estates like Lokoya and Pulido-Walker put up prices in the $200 to $400 range.

There is an exquisite tension inherent in a wine that sees Napa’s longest growing season—and some of its lowest yields. San Pablo Bay breezes allow tiny grapes to cultivate crunchy acidity levels that magically balances mountain Cabernet’s prodigious concentration. One swirl in the glass sends up a mesmerizing bouquet of ripe blackcurrant and plum, laced with warm toasty cigar box and tobacco notes. It’s so deep, you could practically fall into it.

For Napa winemakers, the 2023 vintage was spectacular in just about every way—except, arguably, for the artificial scarcity many estates practice to maintain exclusivity. As the harvest set new tonnage records, blue-chip estates had only a fig leaf to hide their bountiful production behind.

Even here on Mt. Veeder, where miniscule productions are the rule, volumes shot past the usual mailing-list allocations. That fact—plus a few other points of leverage we have in today’s wine market—allowed us to negotiate this down to what could be our greatest Napa mountain Cab deal EVER.