2021 Maxville Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

We didn’t know Maxville Estate well. But when we heard who they’d nabbed as their winemaker, we were on the phone in minutes. 

Nestled in Napa’s Chiles Valley AVA, Maxville Estate has been quietly making great wine since 2014. In 2023, they made a splash by hiring Jeff Owens, the Cabernet ace with an impressive bearing the names Cakebread, Odette, and Plumpjack. Owens trained with Tony Biagi and built CADE into an icon from the ground up—and Maxville’s 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon, which went through final blending and into bottle shortly after his debut, shows just how high this estate can climb. And they’re just getting started. 

Maxville feels way off the beaten path, but is a mere 30-minute drive from the Silverado Trail. The estate, which spans 1,000 acres, has just acres 100 planted to vine, and it enjoys some of the widest diurnal temperature variations in Napa Valley: 40–50-degree swings between daytime highs and nighttime lows. Add in the fog from Suisun Bay and the elevation of almost 1,000 feet, and you’ve got a recipe for spectacular Cabernet.

Maxville’s wines show substantial body and structure, with very fine, integrated tannins for excellent balance—no overblown fruit-bombs here. One big key to their quality is their practice of micropicking: They select very specific blocks in the vineyard, vinify the fruit separately, then select the best barrels from each block. 

Owens and his team are giving the process more attention than it’s ever enjoyed before, and the payoff has been huge. This bottle is fantastic, but also a mere taste of what’s to come.