Silver Oak - Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2018 (3L)

The 2018 Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is ruby in color with notes of strawberry, fresh carnation, black pepper and vanilla. This wine builds in strength and body across the mid-palate with a blackberry character on the finish and bright cherry return. With integrated tannins, it’s expressive yet luxurious with an even, balanced finish. Given proper cellaring conditions, this wine will continue to improve through 2043.

Blend: 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15.2% Merlot, 5.1% Cabernet Franc, 3.2% Petit Verdot, 0.5% Malbec

Silver Oak was started in 1972 with a simple driving philosophy - to focus production on only one varietal, Cabernet Sauvignon. What's more, they resolved to create a wine with a style all its own: not another hard, tannic red wine requiring years of aging to enjoy, but a wine of fully developed flavors and a velvety soft texture on the day it is released for sale.

Silver Oak produces Cabernet Sauvignon from two appellations. Their Napa Valley derives its fruit from both owned and contracted vineyards, and is produced entirely at their Oakville winery. Beginning in 1994, small amounts of Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Petit Verdot have been included in their Napa blend to add complexity and softness.

Silver Oak also produces stellar Cabernet from their Alexander Valley vineyards. A critical reason for the success of this wine, and every wine they make, has always been that they create the final blend before aging it in American oak barrels and then bottles. Over the course of four-and-a-half years, the wine’s flavors, aromas, and textures have an opportunity to meld with one another and the wood’s delicate qualities to create the kind of graceful cohesion found only in the world's most elegant wines.

This structured and concentrated wine is spot on for the vintage. It’s very dense in color and aroma, saturated with ultra dark chocolate, graphite and blueberries on a firm texture of taut tannins that will need time to evolve. Aged in 85 to 90 percent new American oak barrels.

The lovely ruby red colour is translucent, revealing a heady wine of blackberry, liquorice, vanillin, spicebush, and dried floral notes with savoury, toasty oak spices. This 2018 offers one of the more restrained and pretty bouquets of Silver Oak's Napa Cabernet in my memory. Very elegant on the entry, revealing a medium-bodied red wine with lovely cranberry fruit, plums, and currants, with a real depth to those fruit qualities framed by sculpted tannins that affix themselves onto the palate before giving way and resolving. Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant with trace amounts of Petit Verdot and Malbec. Aged in 85% new American Oak from The Oak Cooperage in Higbee, Missouri, the Duncans have owned it outright since 2015. The other 15% are second-use American oak barrels. They've been using the same cooperage for decades. The barrels imbue the Silver Oak wines with a classic vanillin quality, a nuance they always want to retain, even as they experiment with various toasts to produce smoother tannins in the toasting process.