EISELE VINEYARD Cabernet Sauvignon - Napa Valley, California 2018 MAGNUM

Description

The 2018 Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon is a stunning expression of Napa Valley’s terroir, earning 99 points from James Suckling and The Wine Advocate. Its deep purple-black colour hints at its intensity, with an extraordinarily aromatic nose of dark chocolate, cassis, baked plums, and Morello cherries. Notes of red roses, violets, pencil shavings, cinnamon, and dusty soil add complexity. On the palate, it is full-bodied, elegantly structured, and vibrant, with electric acidity and firm, grainy tannins that provide remarkable backbone. The finish is long, perfumed, and packed with energy, perfectly capturing the vintage’s power and finesse. Ideal for ageing from 2024 to 2058, this wine promises to develop further, revealing layers of rich, concentrated fruit and mineral character that make it a true Napa icon.

To produce the estate's flagship wine, three quarters of the 38-acre Eisele Vineyard is dedicated to Cabernet Sauvignon and its companion varieties, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. The resulting wine is an intense expression of the Eisele Vineyard terroir, exhibiting characteristic flavors of cassis, blackberry, cedar and chocolate, with a lingering mineral finish. Cabernets from the Eisele Vineyard are highly regarded for their complexity, concentration, weight without heaviness, silky texture and ability to age for decades.

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THE WINE ADVOCATE 99 points
Drink Date: 2024 - 2058
The very deep, purple-black colored 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon is made from 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. It takes a fair amount of swirling to unlock an incredibly intense nose of dark chocolate, warm cassis, baked plums and Morello cherries plus touches of red roses, violets, pencil shavings, cinnamon stick and dusty soil with a hint of iron ore. The full-bodied palate is so exquisitely elegant, charged with electric black and red fruits and a firm frame of super-ripe, grainy tannins and bold freshness, finishing very long and very perfumed. This is pure energy in a glass!

“2018 was nice for us—it was an easy vintage,” Eisele Vineyard’s winemaker Helene Mingot told me last year. “The conditions for ripening were ideal. It was a nice, cool summer. We didn’t have too much problem with vigor. Our vines are 25 years old, so our yields remained 2.5 to three tons per acre. It was a long harvest because we could harvest when we wanted. This year was the highest color we ever recorded!”

During my visit this year, she added, “These 2018s were not so easy to age. It was hard to know what direction to take—the amount of racking, toast level, etc. The wines had a different structure and freshness, the polymerization dynamic was different from previous vintages.”

In addition to the Altagracia and Cabernet Sauvignon, Eisele Vineyard revealed a new wine for 2018: Pickett. It is essentially a “third wine.” “It was developed to give us more selection for Altagracia,” managing director Antoine Donnedieu told me. “Altagracia continues its trajectory to become the best expression of our eastern vineyards. The new Pickett wine receives a little less time in barrel and less new oak than the other two reds, designed for earlier consumption." - Lisa Perrotti-Brown, 30th Nov 2020

JAMES SUCKLING 99 points
Blackberry, dried-blueberry, bitter-chocolate and some volcanic-ash and burnt-orange aromas. Crushed stone and subtle vanilla notes, too. It’s full-bodied with firm, chewy tannins framing a deep core of dark fruit. Dense, muscular and firmly structured. So long. Goes on for minutes. Elegance with power. Really love the beautiful refinement and integrity to this. Captures the essence of the vintage. Try from 2025.