Description
Wine Details
“Making our Napa Valley Cabernet is like a puzzle,” says Far Niente Winemaker Nicole Marchesi. “Throughout the growing season and especially at harvest, I’m thinking about how all of the different vineyard components will complement our estate grown-fruit and come together to make a really balanced, beautiful wine.”
Vinification/ Aging: The grapes were carefully selected and each variety was vinified separately. Fermentation took place with selected yeasts and an average of 12 days of skin contact took place to ensure the desired levels of extraction of colour, flavour and fine tannins. The blend was aged for 17 months in French oak in the Far Niente cellar caves, of which 65% was new and 35% was second fill.
Alcohol Grade: 14.5%
Best to have it: 16-18ºC
Size: 750 ml
The Winery: Far Niente Winery
Far Niente was founded in Oakville, California in 1885 by John Benson, a forty-niner of the California gold rush and uncle of the famous American impressionist painter, Winslow Homer. Benson hired architect Hamden McIntyre, and together they worked to create an exquisite oasis in western Oakville.
Far Niente prospered until the onset of Prohibition in 1919. The gates closed, but the magic never truly disappeared from the property. Sixty years later, Gil Nickel bought and restored the winery and neighboring vineyard. This three-year-long labor of love put the label back on the map — and on the National Register of Historic Places. He preserved the Far Niente name — an Italian phrase which romantically translated means ‘without a care.’ Nickel hoped to recapture a bygone era when life was indeed without a care.
To this day, Far Niente is consistently recognized as a benchmark producer of Napa Valley Chardonnay and Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. Ours is an unparalleled level of time-honored winemaking traditions. This has helped establish Far Niente as one of the world’s great wine estates.
Napa Valley Cabernet is a heritage wine and speaks to 40-year legacy as growers and producers of unparalleled Cabernet. The wine combines select vineyards in Calistoga, Oak Knoll, St. Helena, Stags Leap, Diamond Mountain, and Yountville that complement our estate vineyards in Oakville. These wines are the very embodiment of a long-established house style and are representative of all that is right with Napa Valley Cabernets. Indeed, the marriage of these diverse vineyards has enabled them to craft Napa Valley Cabernet at a nearly inconceivable level.
