Winemaker Notes
The 2019 OVID Napa Valley red wine is certainly their best effort yet. Perfectly ripe mulberry, bay laurel, cassis and red tobacco leaf intermingle with boysenberry, fresh plum, cerise and iodine. Beautifully balanced, this taut and powerful vintage delivers mouthwatering freshness, intensity and poise that will continue to reveal its many delightful layers for decades to come.
Blend: 68% Cabernet Sauvignon, 22% Cabernet Franc, 5% Merlot, Petit Verdot
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
Another perfect wine is the 2019 OVID, which is based on 68% Cabernet Sauvignon, 22% Cabernet Franc, 5% Merlot, and the rest Petit Verdot. Incredibly perfumed, nuanced, and complex, it has ripe black and blue fruits as well as notes of gravelly earth, tobacco, lead pencil shavings, and truffle. Insanely pure, full-bodied, and perfectly balanced, with fine tannins, this is another heavenly wine from this team and offers everything you could want from wine.
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Decanter
It is a skyscraper of a wine, with power, energy, grace, and a savoury profile that belies its place under the ample California sunshine. Impressively fresh, with dark, youthful brooding aromas of inky black fruits intermingling with savoury fresh thyme and sage, crushed minerals, blue agave, and smoky cedar. Full-bodied and tension-filled with expressive boysenberry and plum fruits, balanced by the saturating power and unctuousness of just-crushed fresh-picked blackberries. The towering structure is composed of long and angular fine-grained tannins. The finish reveals a torrent of refined brown baking spices and more cedar with the tightly wound, coiled-up energy of a Napa Cabernet that will impress for decades. Simply put, wow.
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James Suckling
Red currants and lead pencil with roses. Medium-bodied and hemmed in, giving really fine and polished tannins that run the length of the wine. Firm and racy.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Ovid's 2019 Red Wine—a blend of 68% Cabernet Sauvignon, 22% Cabernet Franc and 5% each Merlot and Petit Verdot—boasts classic Napa mountain notes of black cherries and cassis, intermixed with hints of dried sage. It's full-bodied and concentrated yet still fresh and vibrant, without being as brash or bold as the 2019 Hexameter. Complex, refined and even elegant, it finishes long and savory, adding a welcome bass note of mocha. Rating: 96+
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Wine Spectator
This is packed with a range of steeped black currant, black cherry and blackberry fruit flavors that work together to form a well-built core, while underlying alder, warm earth and sweet tobacco nuances emerge steadily through the finish. Powerfully rendered and well-detailed...Best from 2024 through 2038.
OVID is an organically farmed, 15-acre vineyard perched on a secluded mountaintop at 1,400 ft. elevation in the western reaches of the Pritchard Hill geography of Napa Valley. Here, they farm rocky red, volcanic soils to capture a true sense of place and craft long lived wines composed of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Petit Verdot. They ferment only with native yeasts and bottle their wines without fining or filtering.
The Winemaker since 2006, Austin Peterson, combines his site-specific experience with a sense of experimentation, embracing a tension between classical and cutting-edge winemaking methods.
The name was inspired by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso [Ovid], whose METAMORPHOSES, a poetic retelling of the Greek myths, celebrates themes of transformation and change.
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.