Welcome to the Wine Spies Intrigue Awards for 2016! Each year we recognize our most popular and most sought-after wines from the previous year - while giving our Operatives one final chance to secure some of the winning wines for themselves.

We may never show this wine again, so grab yours while you still can.

Today’s Saddleback Cellars 2011 Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon is our 2016 Wine Spies Intrigue Award winner for Most Requested Cabernet Sauvignon. We have a special offer on their fantastic wine.

Nils Venge is one of America’s best contemporary winemakers, and we are very proud to have featured nearly 30 of his wonderful wines over these last several years. With each successive vintage, Nils’ wines seem to get better and better.

This wine is lush and dark on the nose, with black cherry, cherry tobacco, mocha, bramble, young strawberry, twigs, spice, oak, with a savory herb undernote.

On the palate, today’s special Cabernet is very flavorful, with balanced flavors of juicy black cherry, mulberry, young blackberry, mixed spice, toasty oak, espresso bean, darkly toasted oak, graphite, slate and subtle baked apple.

Decant for best results. As this wine breathes, it softens to become even more elegant and succulent. Drink now, or hold for the next decade.

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What the wine press has to say:

Jon Bonne - Wine Writer, San Francisco Chronicle - “From the heart of Oakville (with a small dose of Carneros Cabernet Franc), veteran Nils Venge shows a suave Napa expression. Disregard the maple­ syrup sweetness that appears on first sniff (there’s 65 percent new oak) and focus on the balance of violets, coffee, graphite and pretty currant fruit, and skill evident in its big, savory structure, balancing juicy flavors and a green­ olive accent.”