2021 Dalla Valle Vineyards Collina Red Wine Napa Valley 750 ml

Dalla Valle is an Oakville icon. 

It’s not uncommon for a taste of their terroir—ushered to the bottle by Napa winemaking legend Andy Erickson and Maya Dalla Valle—to cost over $500. That’s why their Collina bottling is such a phenomenal opportunity. Grown on the exact same eastern Oakville terroir as Dalla Valle’s top bottlings—20 certified-organic acres that reach up to 450 feet of elevation—it comes for less than half the price of their estate-grown Cabernet, and a quarter of their flagship Maya wine.

2021 was Maya Dalla Valle’s first vintage as full-time winemaker here, and Wine Advocate awarded her 100 points for her eponymous cuvée, Maya. Collina is her luxurious blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot, an irresistible 2021 that Antonio Galloni called “a joyous wine...flat-out delicious,” and “an absolute knockout.” 

Dalla Valle crafts some of the most coveted wines in the country, and Collina is one of their most accessible bottles. The name translates to “hill” in Italian, and it’s been given to this incredibly delicious red because the majority of the fruit comes from the younger vines of Dalla Valle’s legendary hillside blocks.

In the 2021, Erickson and Dalla Valle blended roughly equal parts of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon with a brushstroke of Petit Verdot to create a wine that strikes an elusive balance: It’s phenomenal right now, but also capable of aging for a decade-plus, and will surely develop more of Dalla Valle’s characteristic grace and complexity.