Winemaker Notes
The 2023 DeCarle Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, from the western Rutherford bench, captivates with aromas of rose petal, black currant, and espresso. This texture-driven wine offers a nice core of concentrated dark fruit flavors, enhanced by firm, chewy tannins. The vineyard’s strict leafing procedures and overhead sprinklers ensured optimal performance during the warm growing season, allowing for fine-tuning and focusing on specific blocks, resulting in less quantity but higher quality. The wine’s balanced acidity and structured tannins promise excellent aging potential.
Professional Ratings
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Tasting Panel
Sinewy and tense, its dusty raspberry-skin tannins melding with a rich, mineral core. Engaged with dried lavender, jasmine and a hint of iron, the wine boasts a juicy nature, revealing black cherry washing over spiced cedar.
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Jeb Dunnuck
From a site in Rutherford, the 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon Decarle Block has a deeper, richer, broader style, with chocolaty red and black fruits, spicy oak, and savory, floral aromas and flavors. It's gorgeously textured and medium to full-bodied, with ripe, velvety tannins and just about flawless balance. This is a killer 2023 that can be drunk any time over the coming two decades or more. Drink 2025-2045.
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Wine Enthusiast
Aromas of black plum, blackberry, pencil shavings, and cracked pepper drive the nose of this wine. The palate is decadent but bright, with plush tannin and juicy acid framing flavors of roasted cherry, dark berry, malted cocoa, licorice, mint, and cinnamon that echo across a long finish.
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Wine Spectator
Inky in aroma and color, this offers a dense, deep core of black currant and blackberry compote flavors laced with warm earth, roasted cedar and tobacco. Tilts a touch more toward fleshy and flattering than your typical Rutherford Cab, with the fruit powering through on the lengthy finish, but that iron note is buried, too. Best from 2028 through 2040.
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.