Pick My Next Bottle – 2007 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

The February installment of Pick My Next Bottle focuses on 2007 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. As I mentioned in the first installment, the purpose of this series is to provide insight into specific wines or producers you may currently have in your cellar. I plan on opening the winning bottle this Thursday and will publish a Bottle Note shortly thereafter.

Napa Valley’s 2007 Cabernets were highly acclaimed from the start. The growing season was almost perfect with just 3 inches of rain between March and September. Critics have claimed the wines are too ripe or even too powerful but I think they are exceptional. The best wines from the vintage should be entering a very long drinking window.

The contenders:

• 2007 Dalla Valle Cabernet Sauvignon – Revealing a more intense purple color, the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon offers gorgeous aromas of creme de cassis, crushed rock, underbrush and licorice. It has a similar weight but more structure and perhaps an extra dimension in terms of fruit, glycerin and length. Impressively built and slightly more reserved than the 2008, it is a pure, beautifully balanced Dalla Valle that will benefit from 2-3 years of cellaring. It should drink well for two decades or more. 93 points from the Wine Advocate.
• 2007 Outpost Cabernet Sauvignon – The 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon is their finest regular offering to date. This 100% Cabernet Sauvignon possesses a dense, full-bodied personality, an inky/purple color, plenty of graphite, subtle toast, blueberry and blackberry fruit, striking minerality, a layered texture (something Thomas Brown seems to get in all of his wines), and a long finish. It is the kind of Cabernet Sauvignon that seems to pass the torch of quality and greatness from the old boys who started here, but have now been dramatically surpassed in quality by newcomers such as Outpost and nearby neighbor O’Shaughnessy, to name a few. 95 points from the Wine Advocate.
• 2007 Pahlmeyer Proprietary Red– The sensational 2007 Proprietary Red Wine (a 7,000-case blend of 82% Cabernet Sauvignon and the rest Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and Malbec) is slightly more restrained aromatically than the Merlot, but there is no doubting its extraordinary bouquet of subtle smoked meats, oak, mountain wild flowers, blueberries, blackberries, coffee, and cassis. Super-rich and full-bodied with noticeable, but stunningly sweet tannins, it possesses a rare minerality and definition, characteristics that seem to be found across the board in Napa’s 2007s. This dense, powerful red needs 3-5 years of cellaring, and should have 25 years of life ahead of it. 96 points from the Wine Advocate.

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Thanks for voting! I’d love to see a comment below on why you picked one bottle over another. Also, let me know if you have any suggestions for the March installment of Pick My Next Bottle.