2018 The Phoenix Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

Siphoned off from a multimillion-dollar cellar, this Cabernet Sauvignon is an incredible bottle from a Napa icon. We have to refrain from naming the winery, but it’s one that many of you are already passionate fans of. Robert Parker has counted them among his Napa Valley “superstars” and Food & Wine dubbed them “one of the Valley’s most exquisite small gems.”

This hallowed house expends untold resources honing single-vineyard releases to perfection. Collectors carve out precious space for these cuvées—which have nabbed 98–100 points numerous times from Wine Advocate—on their shelves alongside bottles of Harlan, Colgin, Screaming Eagle, and Dalla Valle.  

We know the vineyards that make this kind of quality possible like the back of our hand. Their contoured hillsides and sun-dappled valleys produce just around 600 cases of wine a year, so when the opportunity arose to put our hand at the tiller and help craft a bottle exclusively for Wine Access members, we knew the exact plots—and even the individual rows—where we wanted to go.

One site, marked by gravelly loam soils, produces grapes that show classic notes of the prized Rutherford Bench: hints of earthy spice worked into dense, dark, rich fruit. The second vineyard, resting on a high and rugged mountain slope, yields grapes with a taut acidity and mineral-infused structure. The warmest of the source winery’s three main vineyards—the one that produces the densest, fullest-bodied Cabernet—turns up the volume on The Phoenix.

We put our favorite Cab grapes together (along with small touches of Petit Verdot, Merlot, and Malbec) to make The Phoenix even more polished and approachable in the short term.