Ovid - Napa Valley Red 2019

A truly spectacular vintage in Napa, 2019 began with a steady beat of rain that fell through the spring, recharging the reservoir in the soil and setting up the vines for a verdant start to the season. The warm spring days that followed gently raised the tender shoots and filled our canopies. Long and temperate sun-soaked days transitioned the seasons, packing the fruit with flavor and intensity. From mid-August to September, the last warmth of the summer beckoned harvest, much to our delight.

Starting on the first of October and finishing almost three weeks later, harvest was luxuriously long and proved to be classic in many respects. This shift in timing was the hallmark of a more traditional period and marked a departure from the previous few early vintages. Like the season, the wines, too, are classic – dense and rich with loads of color and expression.

The 2019 OVID Napa Valley red wine is certainly our 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.

Another perfect wine is the 2019 OVID.  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. Give it 4-5 years and enjoy over the following two decades.

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.