Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
This distinctively fresh wine emits a creamy flow of spiced pomegranate, red tea, and vanilla-coated cherry. Melding with white pepper and hyacinth, focused acidity carries the palate to a high-energy finish.
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James Suckling
Luscious red currants, potpourri, mulberries, blackberries and spices. The palate is juicy and refined, with a textured mouthfeel and firm tannins leading to a mouthwatering, polished finish. An approachable, floral cabernet.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon C.C. Ranch offers plums, chocolaty herbs, graphite, and loamy earth on the nose. This carries to a medium to full-bodied and concentrated 2023 that has firmer tannins, good balance, and beautiful length. It needs 2-4 years of bottle age but should see its 20th birthday in fine form. It doesn't have the tannin quality of the top releases here, but it's still a beautiful wine. Drink 2027-2045.
Rating: 92+ -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From a property just west of Silverado Trail, the 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon C.C. Ranch features welcoming scents of dusty earth, black cherries and blackberries. It's full-bodied, rich, concentrated and ripe, framed by dusty tannins and bright acidity on the finish.
A noble variety bestowed with both power and concentration, Cabernet Sauvignon enjoys success all over the globe, its best examples showing potential to age beautifully for decades. Cabernet Sauvignon flourishes in Bordeaux's Medoc where it is often blended with Merlot and smaller amounts of some combination of Cabernet Franc, Malbecand Petit Verdot. In the Napa Valley, ‘Cab’ is responsible for some of the world’s most prestigious, age-worthy and sought-after “cult” wines. Somm Secret—DNA profiling in 1997 revealed that Cabernet Sauvignon was born from a spontaneous crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc in 17th century southwest France.
The Rutherford sub-region of Napa Valley centers on the town of Rutherford and covers some of Napa Valley’s finest vineyard real estate, spanning from the Mayacamas in the west, to the Vaca Mountains on the other side of the valley.
Inside of the Rutherford AVA, bordering the Mayacamas, is a stretch of uplands called the Rutherford Bench. (These bench lands technically run the length of Oakville as well). Mountain runoff creates deep, well-drained, alluvial soils on the bench, giving vine roots plenty of reason to permeate deep into the ground. The result is wine with great structure and complexity.
Rutherford Cabernet Sauvingons and Bordeaux Blends garner substantial attention for their enticing fragrances of dusty earth and dried herbs, broad and juicy mid-palates and lush and fine-grained tannins. The sub-appellation claims some of the valley’s most prized vineyards today, namely Caymus, Rubicon and Beckstoffer Georges III.
It is also home to Napa’s most influential and historic personalities. Thomas Rutherford, responsible for the appellation's name, made serious investments here in grape growing and wine production between the years of 1850 to 1880. Gustave Niebaum purchased a large swath of land and completed his winery in 1887, calling it “Inglenook.” Today this remains the oldest bonded winery in California. Georges Latour founded Beaulieu Vineyard in 1900, making it the oldest continuous winery in the state. Latour also hired the famous enologist, André Tchelistcheff, a man credited for single-handedly defining the modern Napa winemaking style.