Winemaker Notes
Blend: 86% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Malbec, 7% Petit Verdot
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
All of the Chappellet red wines in 2023 are simply dazzling. They capture the classic hallmarks of a cool vintage—blue-fruit fireworks mingling with black fruit and spice, and a towering tannic structure built for long-term cellaring. The Pritchard Hill and Hideaway wines are standouts, and in a photo finish, this Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon serves as a true standard-bearer and benchmark for the region. It’s got everything you could want and more: blue and black fruit, graphite and iron, violets, and fragrant toasty oak spices. Over the coming years, these elements will mellow and knit together into a beautifully complex, fragrant, and flavourful wine. For now, it’s bold, ripe, and seductively pure – so alluring you’ll struggle to put the glass down. Nuances of dark roasted coffee and dark chocolate weave fine threads of character through a bed of super-fine-grained tannins. Totally captivating.
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Wine Enthusiast
Robust aromas of roasted cherry, spiced plum, espresso, and flowers lift the nose of this Cabernet Sauvignon. The palate expresses a lively personality with rounded tannin, juicy acid, and flavors of concentrated berry coulis, black plum skin, pithy orange peel, and violets that blossom along the finish. Delicious now, this will age effortlessly for at least a decade.
Editors' Choice -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Another excellent wine slated for release in early 2026, Chappellet's 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon Signature combines hints of scorched oak and mocha with mixed red and black cherries, plus underlying cassis fruit. Sourced from various mountain sites in Napa Valley, it's medium- to full-bodied, richly textured and concentrated, with a long, velvety finish.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Dense purple-hued, the 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon Signature offers up cassis, ripe blue fruits, graphite, scorched earth, and leafy tobacco, with a Pauillac-like lead pencil character that develops as the wine sits in the glass. It's medium to full-bodied and concentrated on the palate, with ripe tannins and nicely integrated acidity. Very much in the style of the vintage, it should have 15-20 years of overall longevity. Drink 2025-2045.
The Chappellets' romance with Pritchard Hill began when Donn and Molly Chappellet first glimpsed the mountain's spectacular vistas in the late 1960s. Inspired by the notion that Bacchus loves the hills, Donn and Molly followed the advice of legendary winemaker André Tchelistcheff and settled on the rocky eastern slopes of the Napa Valley. There, on the mountain’s serene and picturesque hillsides, the Chappellets established their home and winery, raising their children and cultivating the vineyards.
Since being founded by Donn and Molly in 1967, Chappellet has earned acclaim championing the robust power and complexity of wines crafted from mountain grapes. At the same time, Chappellet has helped to establish Pritchard Hill as one of California’s most revered winegrowing sites. To honor the mountain's rich, expressive character, the winemaking team focuses on creating extraordinary, age-worthy Cabernet Sauvignons that embody the intensity and finesse of fruit from Pritchard Hill.
One of the most prestigious wines of the world capable of great power and grace, Napa Valley Cabernet is a leading force in the world of fine, famous, collectible red wine. Today the Napa Valley and Cabernet Sauvignon are so intrinsically linked that it is difficult to discuss one without the other. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that this marriage came to light; sudden international recognition rained upon Napa with the victory of the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon in the 1976 Judgement of Paris.
Cabernet Sauvignon undoubtedly dominates Napa Valley today, covering half of the land under vine, commanding the highest prices per ton and earning the most critical acclaim. Cabernet Sauvignon’s structure, acidity, capacity to thrive in multiple environs and ability to express nuances of vintage make it perfect for Napa Valley where incredible soil and geographical diversity are found and the climate is perfect for grape growing. Within the Napa Valley lie many smaller sub-AVAs that express specific characteristics based on situation, slope and soil—as a perfect example, Rutherford’s famous dust or Stags Leap District's tart cherry flavors.