For over 20 years, Cathy Corison has sourced her Napa cabernet from the same three vineyards, gravelly sites on the western benchland between Rutherford and St. Helena. This offers that area’s distinctly plush and gentle tannins in a Napa Valley cabernet of the old school. It feels formal and reserved, contrasting fresh herbal notes of pipe tobacco and cedar with classic cabernet flavors of red and black currants. Impeccably balanced, this has a scent that’s as compelling as any premier cru Pauillac, with the sunny profile of the Mayacamas benchlands. In other words, it smells pretty great, especially after it’s been open for a day. Built for the cellar, this will provide delicious drinking with roast lamb over the next ten years.

I love Cathy Corison’s fine and elegant Napa cabernets and will be writing a full-length feature on her and her lovely wines in the not too distant future. Her most recent releases hail from the 2010 vintage and are excellent. Here 2010 Napa Valley bottling tips the scales at a very civilized 13.6 percent alcohol and offers up a superb bouquet of red and black cherries, gentle cigar smoke, incipient notes of allspice and fresh nutmeg, a lovely base of soil, a touch of violets and a judicious framing of cedary new wood. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, pure and nicely balanced, with a fine core of fruit, plenty of firm, ripe tannins and excellent length and grip on the youthful and very promising finish. I would give this classic Napa cabernet a solid decade in the cellar to start to blossom- its true apogee is probably still twenty years out from the vintage! 2024-2060.

Although she has found something akin to celebrity status in the eyes of those recently arrived to the dance who somehow think Napa Cabernets of refinement and nuance are new and revolutionary, winemaker Cathy Corison has for some time now been turning out balanced, well-focused wines such as this that steer away from high ripeness and blatant oak. If fairly tight and less than fully forthcoming at present, its flavors are constant and comfortably fruited, and its teasing touches of black olives, toasted herbs, dusty soils and graphite are signals enough that increased complexity and richness are the certain rewards for five or six years of patience.