2022 Decoded Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

“They’re calling it the Tale of Two Harvests,” winemaker Trevor Sheehan told us, as his car climbed toward the steep mountain vineyard whose name he’d sworn us not to reveal.

The son of a top L.A. entertainment executive, Sheehan has parlayed macher-level networking skills into the world of high-end Napa wines. That’s helped him mint blow-out successes that our members will know as the hugely popular GAIT and Technique wines. To show how he’d accomplished the masterstroke of this latest Decoded release, he invited us on a ride-along to the vineyard.

“In 2022, you can pretty much divide the vintage into pre-heatwave and post-heatwave wines,” Sheehan went on, throwing the car into park. “Some winemakers got spooked by the spikes in early September and rushed to harvest. Others threw the dice waiting till things cooled off in October.” Up here, on a wind-raked mountain top overlooking a shimmering lake, Sheehan and the vineyard owner had the luxury of not worrying either way. 

“This is the first place I thought of when I imagined the kind of site that would make a great Cabernet in 2022,” he told us. The old, deep-rooted wines shrug off heat easily. Elevations of up to 2,550 feet and airflow from the Mayacamas and Alexander Valley help temper rising temperatures as well. Meanwhile, the terraced hillsides that sloped away from our boots, packed with loamy sand, guarantee intensity and concentration almost regardless of vintage conditions.

It’s a small, family-owned vineyard that flies under the radar, enabling Sheehan to work miracles in pricing and exclusivity—but volume, not so much. In the case of this Cab, good things come in small packages.