2013 Rockledge Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon "The Rocks" Napa Valley 750 ml

2013 Rockledge “The Rocks”: Robert Parker’s “Cup Runneth Over”

In two of the first three releases, Peter Snowden’s Rockledge wowed The Wine Advocate with a magnificent Cabernet Sauvignon drawn off the rocky substrata of St. Helena. Describing Snowden’s 92-point “The Rocks,” Robert Parker wrote: “This ink-colored wine is dense, rich, yet beautifully balanced with ripe tannin. This wine should last for 15-20 years at the minimum.”

When The Wine Advocate gets around to rating the 2013 “The Rocks,” based on our tasting notes of October 24th in N.Y.C., expect a substantial upgrade. The 2013 “The Rocks” is far and away the most explosive Cabernet Sauvignon ever crafted by Rockledge. Here’s why.

On Bordeaux’s Left Bank, most of the challenges châteaux face come in the cooler “off years,” where late-maturing Cabernet Sauvignon struggles to reach full phenolic maturity. On the Silverado Trail, the challenges are quite the opposite. In all but the most exceptional Napa Valley vintages, summers are punctuated by torrid heat spikes that often blister berries, leading to desiccation and uneven ripeness.The 2013 growing season was the most extraordinary of outliers, and as Robert Parker reported on October 30th, “2013 may turn out to be the finest vintage I have experienced in tasting North Coast varietals over the last 37 years.”

A warm spring led to early bud break in the foothills above St. Helena. Flowering went off without a hitch under perfect conditions. With the exception of a single heat spike in the last days of June, temperatures remained mild, making for a large, uniform set of small-berry clusters. July, August, and September remained cool but exceedingly dry. When we visited the valley in late August, growers were elated about the size and quality of the crop, but also concerned about the potential for hydric stress — barely a drop of rain had fallen during the summer months! Those concerns were assuaged in September, when two brief storms passed through the valley, refreshing the Cabernet Sauvignon vines, allowing growers to push back the call to harvest until the first week of October. When the call to harvest finally came, concentration was extreme, but equally importantly, berries were small and skins thick.

As Parker suggested, not since 2001 were sugars so naturally high, acids so firm, and tannins so ripe and sturdy.

Opaque purple. Luscious and sweet nose of black currant, blackberry, licorice, and graphite, lightly touched with new-wood cedar. Massively concentrated, soft and supple on the attack, the core is packed with black-fruit preserves, silken in texture, still perfectly buttressed by the sneaky, dusty tannins that make the 2013 vintage one of the most extraordinary since 2001.

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