“This extraordinary winery continues to produce some of Napa’s most distinguished Cabernets.” – Wine Enthusiast

A 2012 Napa Cabernet that sold for $225 on release. Today it is $65.

That adds up to a head-spinning $160 OFF a library-vintage Cab. We have precisely 286 bottles, and then it is gone.

Extraordinary? Distinguished?

Wine Enthusiast said that about the winery. We say it about this bottle.

Here is the thing about Napa. Behind every famous label there are quiet hands that did the actual work. The assistant winemakers and overseers who steer the day to day operations while the big wig winemakers clock out early. Or don’t clock in at all…

Today’s wine comes from three of them.

Two brothers and one winemaker, with well over a century of experience between them. Fruit from their own small estate vineyard.

Normally you pay over two hundred dollars for that combination. Not today.

Is perfectly aged Napa Cabernet your thing? Still plenty of blackberry and dark cherry, but now with spice box, tobacco, leather, and tilled earth. The kind that keeps your nose in the glass, picking out one more note.

Then keep reading.

Marita’s Vineyard is the Montes family’s dream come true. Their legacy. The result of two brothers toiling over decades.

Bulmaro ‘Maro’ Montes and his older brother Manuel moved to the Napa Valley with their father, Manuel Sr., in the late 1960s. They came to enter the family trade: grape growing.

Maro landed a job at Joseph Phelps. By 1973 he ran their vineyard operations. Under the great Walter Schug, he oversaw the famous Backus Vineyard and helped build their Insignia bottling.

He managed those vineyards for over thirty years. From Schug, and later Craig Williams, he soaked up the art of winemaking. But he always wanted his father’s dream: their own property.

In 2001, he got it. He bought a plot in Coombsville, where he also partnered with Mark Herold on fruit for the famed garagiste project Merus.

He named it Marita’s Vineyard, after his younger daughter.

His older brother Manuel took a different road to the same place. He worked side-by-side with the legendary vigneron Elwood Mee (as in, Mee Ln. in Saint Helena).

How legendary? When Andy Beckstoffer replanted Beckstoffer To Kalon and his other sites, Mee was one of the only people he trusted to buy vines from.

Manuel picked up Mr. Mee’s rarest skill: dowsing. He went on to help countless valley vineyards find water, Joseph Phelps among them, where he helped his brother tend the vines.

One brother finds water with a stick. The other grows Cabernet on top of it. That is the whole Napa business, run by two men from one family.

In 2003 both ‘retired’ to tend Marita’s Vineyard full time. To Maro and Manuel, the vineyard is their garden. They dote on every single vine.

The plot sits about a half mile north of Favia and Faust. Just over 2.5 hillside acres of stoney-gravel soil, the kind that gives you small berries and big concentration.

Coombsville runs a touch cooler than the valley floor. That keeps the wines fresh, with a balance that recalls great Bordeaux and the unmistakable black-fruit core of great Napa Cabernet.

And the winemaker? Kurk Niznik. (Savvy Ops will remember the name from the Sylvie Estate we offered.)

He is not a flashy guy, but his resumé is. He worked under consultant Philippe Melka at Caldwell Vineyards, making wine for nineteen clients. Then the Mondavi Family hired him to help build Continuum and move it from purchased to estate fruit.

Put those three together and you get this bottle. We opened one at HQ and the room went quiet.

2012 kicked off a string of great Napa vintages, and this wine shows it. A little bricking at the rim. Then the nose opens up: ripe black fruit wrapped in tobacco and old leather, like the world’s most inviting smoking lounge.

The palate is supple. The grip has softened into the velvety edge of real maturity, with enough freshness left to keep evolving another seven to ten years.

Perfectly aged Napa Cabernet, made by true masters of their craft, for $65.

We may not see this one again. Secure your bottles while the 286 last.