2018 Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley
The 2018 Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is ruby in color with notes of strawberry, fresh carnation, black pepper and vanilla. This wine builds in strength and body across the mid-palate with a blackberry character on the finish and bright cherry return. With integrated tannins, it’s expressive yet luxurious with an even, balanced finish. Given proper cellaring conditions, this wine will continue to improve through 2043.
There are few wineries in California that embody the pioneering spirit of Napa Valley better than Silver Oak. Founded in 1972, Ray Duncan went all-in with Cabernet Sauvignon early in the game, and the rest, as they say, is history. This mighty oak's roots run deep, and have helped this family-owned winery stand tall and strong amidst Napa's constant winds of change. While many wineries with Silver Oak’s track record and sales volume are content to rest on their laurels and coast, this Oakville institution is relentlessly pursuing perfection anew. They’re doing it primarily in the vineyard, modifying their vineyard practices to ensure that every grape is optimally ripe before it enters the winery. They even have a machine that rolls through the vineyard, scanning and measuring the diameter of emerging shoots in order to map vine vigor (and therefore determine irrigation and pruning needs). That’s pretty intense. The results speak for themselves.
James Suckling
This structured and concentrated wine is spot on for the vintage. It’s very dense in color and aroma, saturated with ultra dark chocolate, graphite and blueberries on a firm texture of taut tannins that will need time to evolve. Aged in 85 to 90 percent new American oak barrels.
Decanter
The lovely ruby red colour is translucent, revealing a heady wine of blackberry, liquorice, vanillin, spicebush, and dried floral notes with savoury, toasty oak spices. This 2018 offers one of the more restrained and pretty bouquets of Silver Oak's Napa Cabernet in my memory. Very elegant on the entry, revealing a medium-bodied red wine with lovely cranberry fruit, plums, and currants, with a real depth to those fruit qualities framed by sculpted tannins that affix themselves onto the palate before giving way and resolving. Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant with trace amounts of Petit Verdot and Malbec.