Winemaker Notes
This wine is crafted from Ink Grade’s highest elevation parcels. Vines are hand-selected, utilizing gentle processing techniques throughout fermentation, employing less new oak and larger aging vessels to maintain and express the purity and pedigree of this vineyard. The resulting wine is profound and possesses tension while remaining fresh and bright. A distinctive artifact of place, Ink Grade Cabernet Sauvignon is truly a grand cru of Howell Mountain.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Intense aromas of currants, red berries, pine cones, conifer and ash. Medium to full body with mountain tannins that are fresh and vivid. So much red currant fruit at the end. Forest fruits, too. Gentle and caressing. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Sappy pine and herbal notes accent blueberries and cherries on the nose of the 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain, the best vintage of this wine I've tasted. It's medium to full-bodied, with a rich, velvety mouthfeel that's deftly balanced by bright acids on the long, tart finish. Streamlined and tannic, this will require patience, but it should blossom into silky radiance given a decade or so of cellaring.
Rating: 94+ -
Wine Enthusiast
Fresh aromas and flavors of just picked cherries and blackberries join bay laurel, dusty earth, cedar and graphite for structured and upright Cabernet. Tannins spread across the palate with taut mountain character that remains approachable in its seriousness. An example of the power, brooding character and distinctiveness of its Howell Mountain origins.
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Wine Spectator
A fresh, sleek and slightly high-pitched style, with damson plum, bitter cherry and red currant coulis notes framed by singed savory and dried rose petal hints. This moves along with focus and pinpoint acidity before a long twang of iron asserts itself on the finish. Atypical for Howell Mountain but distinctive. Best from 2025 through 2036.
Ink Grade, Howell Mountain’s first monopole estate, produces the appellation’s greatest classical wines. The estate vineyard was first planted with vines in the 1870s by visionary pioneer, Theron Ink. Farmed organically and biodynamically since its inception and spanning eight hundred wild acres, our Estate is dotted with vine plantings that nurture and respect the natural habitat. Among the steeply terraced vineyards that cling to the iron-rich volcanic soils, there is a wild purity and raw tension here that awakens the senses. Winemaker Matt Taylor, formerly of Araujo Estate and Domaine Dujac, captures this untamed nature and preserves it by producing elegant, single-estate wines that express the pristine mountain fruit and legacy of the land. To do so requires patience and presence, taking the time to listen to what a place has to say and what it will give. This is an art. This is Ink Grade.
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.