Winemaker Notes
All Hundred Acre wines are made by sorting the fruit berry by berry,fermenting in small French oak fermenters, and long aging in the finest barriques. The secret to Hundred Acre is no compromise and no detail overlooked, ever.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon Ark Vineyard emerges from a parcel of old, volcanic soils that inform the wine to a significant degree. A vivid kaleidoscope of iron, ash, tar, smoke, crushed rocks and dark red berries take shape as this fabulous, pedigreed wine shows off its considerable personality. A cool, inward wine, the Ark is all about minerality and pure tension as a backdrop for the characteristic Hundred Acre fruit. A huge, mineral-soaked finish rounds things out in style. The 2009 is the rare Hundred Acre wine that is not likely to offer immediate pleasure. It will more than make up for that in the future. I can’t wait to see how this explosive, beguiling Cabernet develops over the next few years. Anticipated maturity: 2017-2029.
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Wine Spectator
This elegant style displays backbone and vibrancy, offering fresh, ripe, generous black cherry and blackberry fruit, with silky tannins.
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.
Today Cabernet Sauvignon is the star of this part of Napa’s rugged, eastern hills, but Zinfandel was responsible for giving the Howell Mountain growing area its original fame in the late 1800s.
Winemaking in Howell Mountain was abandoned during Prohibition, and wasn’t reawakened until the arrival of Randy Dunn, a talented winemaker famous for the success of Caymus in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early eighties, he set his sights on the Napa hills and subsequently astonished the wine world with a Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon. Shortly thereafter Howell Mountain became officially recognized as the first sub-region of Napa Valley (1983).
With vineyards at 1,400 to 2,000 feet in elevation, they predominantly sit above the fog line but the days in Howell Mountain remain cooler than those in the heart of the valley, giving the grapes a bit more time on the vine.
The Howell Mountain AVA includes 1,000 acres of vineyards interspersed by forestlands in the Vaca Mountains. The soils, shallow and infertile with good drainage, are volcanic ash and red clay and produce highly concentrated berries with thick skins. The resulting wines are full of structure and potential to age.
Today Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petite Sirah thrive in this sub-appellation, as well as its founding variety, Zinfandel.