2014 Twomey Cellars Merlot Napa Valley 750 ml

From Silver Oak’s Soda Canyon Vineyard

Silver Oak’s founding family, the Duncans, have won global acclaim for setting the bar for lush California Cabernet, but few realize that for two decades at Twomey, they have done the same for Merlot. Harvested from the same Soda Canyon Vineyard that supplies much of their Silver Oak Cabernet, the 2014 Twomey Merlot is a picture of the ripe, supple, and deftly oaked style that has made Silver Oak such a crowd-pleaser.

Since 2012, Twomey has retained world-renowned consulting winemaker Jean-Claude Berrouet, the longtime winemaker at Château Petrus, the world’s standard-bearer for Merlot. Berrouet’s Bordelais touch is resulting in some of the finest Twomey Merlot ever. This is a wine for lovers of Silver Oak Cabernet looking for a little Right Bank finesse in their red—a Napa Merlot that has the structure of a Cabernet but the drink-now silkiness and rich profile you’d expect of a $59.99 bottle. Do not miss this.

Longtime drinkers of Twomey Merlot may have noticed some changes over the last few vintages. The standard-setting Napa Valley Merlot is still grown at the Duncan family’s Soda Canyon property—a stone’s throw from the Stags Leap and Oak Knoll AVAs—best-known for producing Silver Oak’s world-famous Cabernet Sauvignon. It is still aged for over a year in French oak, one-third of it new, and still softened by the long, low-tech, and labor-intensive process known as soutirage.

But in 2012, the Duncan family reunited longtime Twomey and Silver Oak winemaker Daniel Baron with consulting winemaker Jean-Claude Berrouet, his former colleague at Établissement Jean-Pierre Moueix. Établissement Moueix is the Bordeaux outfit that owns, in addition to its prestigious French properties, Napa’s famed Dominus winery. But the most obvious reason that the Duncans chose Berrouet to apply his expertise to Twomey? His history as winemaker at the world’s Merlot standard-bearer Château Petrus—a tenure during which Berrouet made what  Christian Moueix called an “immeasurable” contribution.

2014 was Berrouet’s third year as consulting winemaker at Twomey, and his subtle but significant changes show. He blended in more Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon in order to tame the Merlot fruit and bring forth some of the wine’s finer textural and structural components. Most notably—and most consequentially for consumers—Berrouet trimmed production roughly 40 percent in the last two vintages, and yields for the coming 2015 vintage are down 30 percent. This tightening is certainly leading to a rise in quality. It will also, inevitably, lead to a price increase.

It was an incredible stroke of luck that we were able to secure our first allocation of Twomey when we did: Not only because 2014 was one of the top Napa vintages in recent memory, but because this is an auspicious time at Twomey, which is really hitting its stride under the guiding hand of Jean-Claude Berrouet. This is a fantastic offer for those who love what the Duncan family has done at Silver Oak and Twomey, and utter catnip for those intrigued by the influence of a Right Bank legend on a stellar Napa Merlot. Don’t delay.