It has been eight years since we last featured a St. Clement wine on our pages. Not for our lack of trying to secure a wine from what still remains one of our best-selling wines of these last 10 years. Today, we’re proud to have their 2012 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, which at today’s price is a Super QPR steal!

Rich and sweet on the nose, with rich stewed fruit of blackberry, blueberry, and plum, followed by fresh black cherry, spice box, chocolate, cherry bark, cedar, graphite and black pepper. Rich on the palate, too, with grilled cherry, blackberry compote, plum, spice box, baker’s chocolate, cassis, pencil shavings, tobacco leaf and black pepper.

Years ago, we used to write up a fun, somewhat fictional spy-themed story about our experiences with our winery partners. Just for grins, here is a copy of one of our past missions to St. Clement:

Mission Report:

The following is an extract from our first-encounter mission report, in which Agent White first becomes acquainted with our now-good friends at St. Clement:

It was perhaps the strangest of locations to start a wine mission. I entered the church and as the instructions indicated, I was to go to the second pew and show penance. As I knelt, in the pew, I noticed a book with a bookmark in it. Looking more closely, it was a history of the Papacy and the page that was bookmarked was about Pope Clement I (Clemens Romanus), who is also known as St. Clement. Not being sure if this was the clue, I stayed for another hour and beyond the woman practicing on the organ, nobody came or went from the church.

Back at HQ, I entered in our research computer the search term ‘Clement’ and found that indeed, the bookmark was a clue. All signs pointed in the direction of St. Clement Vineyards in Napa Valley. We had an asset who could get us some additional intel so I PIN messaged Agent Malbec and within a few hours, a courier had delivered a bottle of the St. Clement to our front company.

The bottle was immediately taken to the lab for analysis. The results were clear; It was an almost perfect wine, with fruit from one of the best vineyards in Napa. St. Clement had been on our radar for a couple months. Their winemaker Danielle Cyrot, with a long lineage of European winemakers was making quite a name for herself.

But as we always say, the proof is in the juice… Lab results, research, walks through the vineyards are all nice, but it’s in the glass that matters… Well, there’s no kneeling for St. Clement wines. After tasting it, we were jumping for joy.