2017 FUTO Estate Red Wine Oakville

“Futo is already one of the superstars in a competitive and formidable lineup of top wineries in Napa Valley.” – Robert Parker Back in 2017, your response to the 2013 He-li-an-thus wine was a gratifying thing to see. Here’s a young winery doing everything right, from a gifted winemaker, Jason Exposto, to an expertly farmed hillside site, and finally a backer—venture capitalist Tom Futo—who spares no expense in the cellar. Greatness can be the only result, and you responded. So imagine our delight when Jason Exposto and Jessica Futo graciously agreed to part with a handful of cases of their Futo wines, wines that are praised to the skies by the critics, and made in such small quantity that they are vacuumed up by their mailing list. Well, not all of them. When your neighbors are Harlan Estate and Bond, you must bring your “A” game on every level, from meticulous farming to perfectionist winemaking, to merciless triage in the cave. Futo aims for what they call “concentration and buoyancy,” and one of the ways they achieve this is by never using any press wine, whatsoever, so there is never a seam or a hard edge to be found on any of the wines. Act fast to secure your share of these mailing-list escapees. We acquired just a handful of cases of each of these wines, near-impossible to find outside of world-class restaurants.