2015 Silver Oak Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

Coming from Robert Parker's 97-point vintage, the 2015 Silver Oak Napa Valley is as delicious as you’d expect. Robust and ripe black fruits overflow from the glass: plum, blackberry preserves, accented with dark chocolate and vanilla. It sports a gentle floral lift along with creekbed minerals and an emerging herbal note. Super-plush on the palate, with density and concentration, showing Chambord, warm figs, and toasted coconut—a telltale Silver Oak finish. Simply beautiful concentration and complexity from this low-yielding and historic vintage. 

Visiting with Silver Oak’s Matt Duncan just after harvest with a glass of the 2015 Cabernet in hand, we got on the subject of Release Day, an event that has snowballed ever since Silver Oak’s Napa Valley Cabernet crept into the iconosphere in the 1980s.

Matt told us about the days when the Silver Oak fan base grew bottle by bottle by word of mouth and positive press (not to mention the cheeky Life is a Cabernet license plate holders). “There was no one to bring you your wine back then,” he said, so Silver Oak’s loyal fans turned up at the winery on the day the wine was released, “to make sure they could get the stuff they wanted.” 

That “stuff” was the new vintage, which Silver Oak always debuts four and half years after harvest, much later than most other wineries. That famed aging regimen, two years in American oak and another 20 months in bottle, is all crucial to the Silver Oak style of Cabernet that is infinitely drinkable from the day it becomes available. On Release Day at the winery, Silver Oak fans also clamor for library wines and large format bottles—renowned artist Thomas Arvid draws the available vintages and bottle sizes on a chalkboard, and pares it down as supply dwindles.

This year’s release is bound to whip Cabernet fans into a frenzy, because it comes from a year of spectacular quality and limited quantity. Spring rains that came before the picture-perfect growing season made for a smaller yield, so the 97-point vintage wasn’t quite as bountiful as everyone had hoped. 

Not too long ago, showing up at Release Day was more or less the only way to guarantee your share of Silver Oak—now you only have to make it to Wine Access.