2018 Halpin Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

Our good friend Halpin is always a step ahead. But last August, we managed to one-up him. And then, Halpin reminded us that he’s not to be one-upped.

In classic Halpin fashion, he didn’t inform us of his plot. Halpin’s winemaker Ry Richards would break the news that an extremely special lot of wine he’d been saving for us was no longer ours. It had been bottled in the form of today’s 2018 Halpin Private Reserve Cabernet—with a newly-minted, special-edition black label. 

The Oakville grape source is one that Halpin himself has boasted about when he’s raised bottles of the actual winery’s wine from his own cellar. “If you want better quality grapes,” he’s said, “You’d have to get them from a Bordeaux First Growth!” 

Their flagship Cabernet starts at $500 upon release and rises into the stratosphere outside the mailing list. For most California Cabernet fanatics, the chance to taste even one glass would be enough to catapult them to Nirvana. 

Here’s what happened: Halpin phoned Richards minutes after reading our missive about a wine called Yesterday. In it, we described the grape source as the apogee of classic Oakville terroir—a cult winery with a mailing list that sees a handful of spots open up in a decade, an estate on the receiving end of more 100-point scores than are worth recounting. We guess you could say you’d have to go to a Bordeaux First Growth to get anything better...

Halpin was bullish. He pressed Richards on the source, whether he’d “had a hand in making that Yesterday wine,” and if we’d exhausted our supply from that abundant 2018 vintage. Richards demurred at first, but grew helpless against Halpin’s rapid-fire interrogations, and having worked in the cellars of 100-point winemakers with equally fiery demeanors, he quickly devised “The Oakville Compromise,” which resulted in us learning a valuable lesson: that sometimes, the barrier to fine wine isn’t about access, it’s about the price someone is willing to pay to one-up their friends. 

Richards, therefore, is this story’s antihero. Yes, he took our wine and re-sold it to Halpin at a premium, but he didn’t pocket the profits. He called us immediately, explained that the special project we’d been plotting would unexpectedly be a new Halpin release and that he’d garnered enough capital from Halpin to secure another lot of Oakville Cabernet (from the same source) that we should use before Halpin found out. More on that later… sorry Halpin! 

The 2018 Halpin Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon offers a unique perspective—a bargain snapshot of fruit sourced from a legendary triple-digit Napa estate, showing a deep and brooding purple-ruby color in the glass and revealing both aromas and flavors that simply taste expensive. Enticing blueberry, black cherry, and lavish cedar notes are complemented by flavors of freshly rolled cigar, allspice, and crushed clove while this red balances grippy, firm tannins with the tension and coiled energy you’d expect of an Old World First Growth. All of this culminates in creamy layers of black fruit, savory spice, and mocha notes that linger through a purely Napa-opulent finish.