We give special thanks to our friends at Grand Napa, today, for giving us early access to their newest wine, the 2016 Napa Bridge Vineyards Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. With some additional bottle aging, this wine will be a rich, fruit-forward wine to rival their earlier releases. This is a great opportunity to sample a serious, just-bottled Napa Cab now… and then open a bottle every six months or a year, to see how wines of this stature progress.

As it stands now, this wine is very young, so we expected flavors to be sleepy or tight and restrained. While this wine does need some additional bottle aging to really come into its own, surprisingly, there were loads of dark fruit flavors to be enjoyed. Young blackberry juice, tart cherry, young blueberry, and cassis are wound tightly together with spice, sugarplum, slate mineral, cracked pepper, and dried earth.

Fruit and spice leap out of the glass to greet you on the nose, with aromas of blackberry pie, grilled blueberry, cassis, black rose petal, bramble, flint, spice box and black pepper.

If you wish to open a bottle this year, be sure to decant for best results.

Enjoy now through 2030!