Winemaker Notes
Blend: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
A massive, bold and concentrated wine that pairs high-impact black fruit flavors with equally high-impact tannins. So full-bodied, firm in texture, deep in fruit and built for further aging. Dried blueberries, blackberries, hints of graphite, tobacco and toast.
-
Jeb Dunnuck
Coming from a mix of estate and True Vineyard fruit, the 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon Estate is brilliant stuff and has a more forward, rounded, sexy style than most in the vintage. Lots of red, blue, and black fruits, charcoal, graphite, and spicy oak define this beauty, which is medium to full-bodied, has plenty of mid-palate depth, and a great finish. Drink bottles over the coming 15-20 years.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Outpost's 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon is a beauty, even it doesn't show quite the majestic complexity of the True Vineyard. It still offers up evocative scents of crushed stone, cassis, blackberry and blueberry. It's packed, concentrated and full-bodied in the mouth, ripe—almost creamy in texture across the mid-palate—then rich and velvety on the finish.
-
Wine Spectator
A strapping Cab, with tar-coated blackberry and black cherry fruit that is further infused with licorice snap, cassis bush and singed apple wood notes. Youthfully bristling in its energy; cellar to let this settle in. Best from 2026 through 2038. 1,140 cases made.
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.