A 20-Year Guide to Our Napa Valley Cabernets | Far Niente

98 pt & Wine Enthusiast Top 100 | 2019 Far Niente Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville

A 20-Year Guide to Our Napa Valley Cabernets

03.30.17

Far Niente Cabernet Vintage Chart

We’ve updated our Far Niente Vintage Chart! Discover this comprehensive, 20-year guide to our Napa Valley Cabernets, then and now.

Want to know how that 2005 Far Niente Cave Collection Cabernet Sauvignon is tasting right now? Here at the winery, it’s easy for us to pop down to our wine cave library and pull the cork on an aged wine for a quick assessment. After all, we intentionally hold on to a selection of wines from every vintage in order to do just that.

You, however, might be more hesitant to pull the cork on your own rare and precious vintages. What if it’s too soon? Sure you could pull out the tasting notes our winemaker created when the wine was released, but for wines with more than five years on them, those notes would not reflect how the wine had evolved. It would not reflect how the wines actually tasted today.

With this in mind, we joined Far Niente Winemaker Nicole Marchesi last January and tasted through two decades of wine. The result was a 20-year vintage chart of our Far Niente Cabernets, then and now. This January, we joined Nicole, again, to taste through the newest vintage along with a selection of wines from our Cave Collection. Then, we sat down and updated our 20-year vintage chart with the most current tasting notes.

View our Napa Valley Vintage Chart

With the release of the 2014 vintage, we have grown, barreled and bottled 32 vintages of Far Niente Cabernet. Two more vintages are developing in our wine caves as we speak. Over the past three decades, we’ve learned a few things about growing and crafting age-worthy Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. From striking the ideal balance when extracting tannin and color to honing our French oak barrel program, we’ve committed ourselves to exacting standards, right down to the bottling line. Yes, the bottling line isn’t sexy, but it is essential to making a seductive wine!

Most importantly, we’ve dedicated ourselves to farming our 57-acre Martin Stelling Vineyard according to organic and sustainable standards. Our Oakville Cabernet vineyard is planted on some of the finest gravelly loam soil in the Napa Valley. It stretches into the foothills of western Oakville and is surrounded by other equally prestigious Napa Valley Cabernet sites. The wines we make each year are a direct reflection of this pedigreed property. Raw material matters.

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: each vintage here at Far Niente is our opportunity to make our greatest wine possible. That belief drives every decision we make – from when to prune to when to pick to the time it spends in barrel. Which means the only concern you should have is when to open and savor your special bottles.

We hope you continue to enjoy this 20-year timeline of our wines and vineyards. We’ll release an updated vintage chart each year, so that you always have a rich, personalized – and current! – picture of how our estate-grown wines have evolved and developed over time.

For a peek at currently available Cave Collection vintages, click here.

Far Niente Cave Collection Cabernet

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