Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

The lovely ruby red color is translucent revealing a heady wine of blackberry licorice vanillin spicebush and dried floral notes with savory toasty oak spices. This 2018 offers one of the more restrained and pretty bouquets of Silver Oak’s Napa Cabernet in my memory. Very elegant on the entry revealing a medium-bodied red wine with lovely cranberry fruit plums and currants with a real depth to those fruit qualities framed by sculpted tannins that affix themselves onto the palate before giving way and resolving. Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant with trace amounts of Petit Verdot and Malbec. Aged in 85% new American Oak from The Oak Cooperage in Higbee Missouri the Duncans have owned it outright since 2015. The other 15% are second-use American oak barrels. They’ve been using the same cooperage for decades. The barrels imbue the Silver Oak wines with a classic vanillin quality a nuance they always want to retain even as they experiment with various toasts to produce smoother ta