2016 Elyse Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Holbrook Mitchell Vineyard Yountville 750 ml

We’ve said it before: There’s Big-Name Napa—the wineries that grab the biggest headlines and fetch the biggest prices—and there’s Inside Napa, where top-flight winemakers are turning stellar grapes into small lots of phenomenal wines that rarely make it out of the Valley. Count Elyse, located on tiny Hoffman Lane in Yountville, among them.  

Last fall, we followed a friend’s lead there, and came back with one of our insider finds of the year. Today we’re back with an allocation that no one in the country can match: a Wine Access exclusive on their 2016 Holbrook Mitchell Vineyard Cabernet. 

This is a small-production Cabernet jewel from a historic Yountville vineyard—located in the Napa neighborhood that the renowned Kapcsàndy, Bell, and Gemstone wineries call home—and it bears the fingerprints of Elyse’s 100-point winemaker Russell Bevan. 

The 2016 vintage stands as one of the very best in Napa Valley history, and all the spoils of an ideal season are apparent in this Cabernet. Aged 22 months in 54% new French oak, it’s got a beautiful and deep nose of black currant, plum, cedar, and cola notes, with hints of espresso and mint, and finishing with a fine tannic grip.

Owned and operated for 30 years by Ray and Nancy Coursen, Elyse has now nabbed a big-name Director of Winemaking: Cabernet ace Russell Bevan, who has seven Wine Advocate 100-pointers under his belt, is now ushering their fantastic fruit to bottle. Bevan’s the man about whom Robert Parker wrote “I can’t recommend this up-and-coming producer’s wines highly enough,” and five years later said “I continue to be blown away by the wines from Russell Bevan.” Elyse hired Bevan in 2018, which means he crafted the 2016 from blending to bottle. 

The Holbrook Mitchell vineyard—on the west side of Highway 29 in Yountville, tucked in just a stone’s throw from Keever and Blankiet—has been farmed continuously for more than 140 years. Situated on a hillside less than a mile from the winery, it’s composed of sedimentary, gravelly alluvial soil, which requires the Cabernet roots to struggle, and sink deep to pull out whatever nutrition they can. All that work amounts to small yields of beautifully concentrated and complex berries. The Cabernet then spends nearly two years in French oak barrels (Darnajou and Taransaud), about half of which are new. 

Thanks to last year’s find, we’ve got a direct line to one of the most unbelievable single-vineyard Cabernet values coming out of Napa Valley. This is what Wine Access is all about: small production, huge-value wines we love to discover and deliver to our members. At this price, grab as much as you can.