Winemaker Notes
The 2016 Graduate is always a favorite in our blending sessions. It offers seductive aromas of wild fruits, cassis and warm blackberry pie that invites you in for more. Hints of freshly shaved chocolate, pencil shavings, and ripe fruit compote mesh well with soft, robust tannins that provide for a mouthwatering finish.
Professional Ratings
-
Wine & Spirits
In 2017, Macario Montoya joined Mark Albrecht’s team at Roots Run Deep as winemaker, responsible for blending four different “Higher Education” cabernets. Each originates at a different block in the vineyard, which ranges in elevation from 1,700 to 2,000 feet; each is fermented with a different strain of yeasts and aged in different cooperage. This one spends its time in Seguin Moreau barrels, and the blend includes five percent each of malbec and merlot from Pritchard Hill; those factors tame the dynamic power of its mountain-grown tannins, yielding a trumpet blare of volcanic-soil intensity. Having tasted all four, this one struck our panelists as the most vibrant, layering red, yellow and orange-toned fruit in sunset colors, lasting on herbs, smoke and depths of earthy savor. It’s a complex wine, with all of its details aligned.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Spiced plum, cedar and tobacco highlight a generously full-bodied, concentrated wine that’s deeply etched in tannin and oak. It was blended with 5% Merlot and 5% Malbec.
Roots Run Deep Winery began in 2005 when founder Mark Albrecht set out to answer a simple question: could great Napa Valley wine be both exceptional and accessible? After decades in the wine retail business, Mark saw that too many great bottles were priced or positioned out of reach for everyday drinkers—so he sold his house and everything in it to fund the winery's first vintage and prove otherwise. There was no inherited estate or outside investors behind the project; friends and family who believed in the vision helped turn that leap into a working winery.
That first wine, Educated Guess Napa County Cabernet Sauvignon, became the foundation of the brand. Roots Run Deep believes great wine lives at the intersection of science and craft—combining vineyard data, chemistry, and instinct with a bit of educated guesswork to create wines that are thoughtful, expressive, and approachable. The idea worked: over the years Educated Guess has earned Best Buy, Best of Class honors, and is consistently one of the top selling Napa Valley Cabernets under $50.
More than twenty years later, that same philosophy shapes everything the winery makes. Roots Run Deep still sources fruit primarily from Napa Valley vineyards, while also working with exceptional growers in Sonoma and other regions across California—and the portfolio has grown beyond that first bottle to include a range of small-production wines defined by site, style, and discovery. The name reflects what has always mattered here: strong foundations, deep vineyard relationships, and the belief that great wine should feel both special and approachable.
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.