Squatters Make The Best Critics
TASTING NOTES: “A dream bouquet of delicious black currants, integrated with sweet oak, and luscious cassis aromas. Well integrated oak and dark fruits to compliment a rich and velvety mouthfeel. Fine tannins create balance for a long, elegant finish.” (AbV 14.5%, pH 3.82, TA 0.60 (g/100mL))
VARIETALS: 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, 14.4% Petit Verdot, 0.3% Malbec, 0.2% Merlot
BARRELS: 18 months in French and American oak
PAIRS WITH: an oven-roasted garlic crusted rack of lamb. Also delicious alongside a cheese board with gorgonzola, aged cheddar and gouda
THAT REMINDS ME OF: The Silverado Trail.
Not the wine road, for a second — the actual Silverado Trail. As in, the historic route that runs along the eastern edge of Napa Valley, named after the silver mines that drew prospectors through the region in the 1870s. As in, the same road that Robert Louis Stevenson — yes, Treasure Island Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Stevenson — traveled with his new wife in 1880, camping in an abandoned bunkhouse at the old Silverado Mine on Mount St. Helena and writing about the whole experience in The Silverado Squatters. The man who invented Long John Silver spent his honeymoon in a derelict mining shack in Napa Valley. Romantic in a very specific, nineteenth-century-tuberculosis-patient way.
What I find quietly delightful is that Stevenson was already famous by then — Treasure Island was being serialized in a children’s magazine — and he chose to spend his honeymoon roughing it in a California ghost town, eating canned goods and watching fog roll in over the valley. He wrote about the local wines, too, with genuine curiosity, predicting that Napa would one day rival the great wine regions of Europe. Which, Robert Louis, yes. Correct. Gold star. The man had range: pirates, werewolves, Victorian doubles, and apparently Napa Valley terroir discourse.
The bunkhouse is long gone, but the trail is still there, still running its quiet 29-mile length past vineyards that Stevenson would not recognize and probably would have a lot of feelings about.
ICYMI, you have two choices:
- Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from the sale linked here, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year!
- Want it shipped now? Every package during the summer will have protected temp control ground shipping for much of the country that takes longer but will ensure safe delivery. Expect up to two weeks for delivery. Now through the September 12th offer.
