Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A focused and vivid 2012 now, still offering sliced black mushrooms, black truffle, blackcurrants, and violets. It's a full yet tight and framed wine. Elegant and racy. Delicious now.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Winston Hill Proprietary Red Blend, which is 84% Cabernet Sauvignon, 9% Cabernet Franc and the rest Merlot and Petit Verdot, is a pretty serious hombre. Dense ruby/purple in color with notes of créme de cassis, graphite and concentrated black cherries, the wine has good acidity, sweet tannin and a full-bodied mouthfeel. The purity and overall personality and character of the wine are impressive. It is a very youthful, relatively unevolved wine with tremendous upside. Give it another several years of bottle-age and drink it over the following 15-20 years. Rating: 94+
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is made from a majority of Cabernet Sauvignon, followed by smaller percentages of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot, the lot aged almost two years in 75% new French oak. It presents itself as a classic example of the vintage and the valley, robustly bold and approachable in sage and red berry with a sturdy, sizable structure.
Since the founding of the winery in 1992, Frank Family Vineyards has poured their passion for land, grape growing and winemaking into each and every bottle of Frank Family Vineyards wine. Today they own over 450 acres of the finest vineyard land checkerboarded throughout the Napa Valley. This allows them to control quality and cultivate sustainably on their own estate and enables winemaker, Todd Graff, to blend perfectly balanced wines. With a commitment to crafting the finest representation of Napa Valley wines, Frank Family Vineyards hopes to create a legacy for generations to come.
Undoubtedly proving its merit over and over, Napa Valley is a now a leading force in the world of prestigious red wine regions. Though Cabernet Sauvignon dominates Napa Valley, other red varieties certainly thrive here. Important but often overlooked include Merlot and other Bordeaux varieties well-regarded on their own as well as for their blending capacities. Very old vine Zinfandel represents an important historical stronghold for the region and Pinot noir is produced in the cooler southern parts, close to the San Pablo Bay.
Perfectly situated running north to south, the valley acts as a corridor, pulling cool, moist air up from the San Pablo Bay in the evenings during the hot days of the growing season, which leads to even and slow grape ripening. Furthermore the valley claims over 100 soil variations including layers of volcanic, gravel, sand and silt—a combination excellent for world-class red wine production.