97pts James Suckling

This structured and concentrated wine is spot on for the vintage. It’s very dense in color and aroma, saturated with ultra dark chocolate, graphite and blueberries on a firm texture of taut tannins that will need time to evolve. Aged in 85 to 90 percent new American oak barrels, the wine should be approachable by 2028 and best from 2033.

95pts Decanter

The lovely ruby red colour is translucent, revealing a heady wine of blackberry, liquorice, vanillin, spicebush, and dried floral notes with savoury, 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 tannins in the toasting process.

93pts Wilfred Wong

The 2018 Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet is rich in flavors and sturdy on the palate. This wine excels with aromas and flavors of red and blackberries, with a nice balance of oaky notes. Enjoy it with baked lamb chops in saffron rice. 

Winemaker Notes

The 2018 Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is ruby in color with notes of strawberry, fresh carnation, black pepper and vanilla. This wine builds in strength and body across the mid-palate with a blackberry character on the finish and bright cherry return. With integrated tannins, it’s expressive yet luxurious with an even, balanced finish. Given proper cellaring conditions, this wine will continue to improve through 2043.

A true benchmark, the Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon every year is a glorious rendering of the flavors and textures that have made Napa Valley the epicenter of American winemaking. Ultra-classic notes of cassis and blackberry are the wine’s calling cards, rendered with the opulent, pulpy ripeness characteristic of Napa and burnished by heady suggestions of tobacco and spice. These warm flavors are woven into a fine, intricate structure with palpable density. Tannins are beefy, but fine-grained, sweet in their chewiness. Polished and buffed to be drinkable upon the release, the wine’s concentration and brawny structure give it the musculature to age for decades.

Blend: 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15.2% Merlot, 5.1% Cabernet Franc, 3.2% Petit Verdot, 0.5% Malbec