As you leave the manicured confines of St. Helena, one of Napa Valley’s more upmarket villages, and wind your way up Conn Valley Road toward Seavey Vineyard, it’s like entering a time warp. The thickly wooded hillsides, dotted with old barns, are more sparsely planted with vineyards than the valley floor below. There’s little development. And as you cross Conn Creek to reach the Seavey property, you do so over a bridge first built in 1881.
The centerpiece here is a refurbished former dairy barn that houses both the winery and a more recently excavated barrel room, and it was in this bucolic setting that we were treated to a vertical tasting of Seavey Cabernets going back several decades. Our takeaway (along with a small parcel of this wine) was that Seavey merits inclusion among Napa’s greatest ‘heritage’ wineries—names like Dunn, Heitz, Chateau Montelena—but doesn’t always get that recognition. We’re proud to recognize Seavey’s 1992 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, which they have generously made available to SommSelect customers. Plucked directly from their original resting place in Seavey’s cellars, these bottles are not just in perfect condition: we are able to offer them at a price nearly in line with the winery’s current release.
This 1992 Cabernet Sauvignon is the latest of a number of wines from this vintage to knock our socks off. Although it was a warm, drought-affected year characterized by “opulent” wines on release, we haven’t found ‘92s to be the least bit tired or raisined—quite the contrary, in fact. This wine has tremendous vigor, balance, and aromatic complexity, and still has a little more under the hood, as much of a pleasure as it is to drink now. In the glass, its dark garnet-red core is starting to show some of the perfectly normal ‘bricking’ that comes with age, while the nose just explodes with a beautiful, classic evocation of Cabernet Sauvignon: cassis, black plum, leather, tobacco, cedar, pencil lead, dried herbs…on first pass, you could easily mistake it for a Pauillac with some bottle age, as it shares some of Pauillac’s earthy, mineral savor, but the richness of the fruit component ultimately pulls you back to Napa. The wine’s proportions are just perfect: It’s rich but not over-extracted or sweet, full of life even after being open for a while, and lastingly aromatic on the finish. What a treat to sip such a silky, structurally sound red wine with age for this price. It’ll make a great main-course red for your next special event; I’d recommend decanting it (with an eye for sediment) about a half-hour before you serve it a few degrees north of cellar temp in Bordeaux stems. It’s a wine that improves in the glass—your last sip may well be the best—and will really distinguish itself alongside something similarly classic to eat, like a rack of lamb or a beef tenderloin roast. Get a good crusty sear on the meat, as in this recipe, to bring out the wonderfully savory side of this timeless Napa classic.