Groth Reserve Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon 2018

Winery Notes
This wine represents the finest lots from the Reserve Vineyard of our Oakville Estate. It is a nearly 28-acre band with a disproportionately high amount of chert, a hard and compact sedimentary rock consisting of quartz crystals and fossils. The site’s unique soil profile and ideal climate combine to produce the ultimate expression of Oakville — elegant and age-worthy wines from one of the world’s top Cabernet appellations.

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Tasting Notes
Purple-ruby in color, this wine is dark and rich even to the eye. A plethora of aromatics greet you from the glass, beginning with blueberry and black currant, and leading to cinnamon, mocha, lavender and clove. The final aromatics to reveal themselves are cigar box and wet gravel. When tasting the wine, the first impression is the fine tannin and balanced acid, which then leads to boysenberry, blackberry and ripe plum skin. The finish is seamless and smooth — the hallmark of a Groth Reserve Cabernet.

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Vintage Notes
Long, late and mild sums up the 2018 vintage. We started out with a cooler spring and slightly later than average bud break, but the conditions after bud break were quite pleasant — very little frost threat this year. Those warm and mild conditions held throughout the growing season. We did have a handful of 100+ days, but not more than normal. The later bud break translated into a harvest stretched out by continued mild conditions post-veraison, giving the grapes quite a bit of hang time for exceptional flavor development.

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Vineyard Notes

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Winemaking Notes
All the Cabernet Sauvignon in this wine is from our 27.43-acre Reserve Vineyard at our Oakville Estate. In these blocks, we do a pre-veraison cluster thinning followed by two postveraison cluster-thinning passes. Cabernet clusters are harvested at night, ensuring the berries are plump, the crews aren’t battling the summer heat, and the fruit will remain cool for processing earlier in the day. Clusters are initially selected in the field, followed by a secondary sorting by hand at the winery. They are destemmed, and the grapes are mechanically sorted, assuring only the best berries go into each small fermentation lot. Fermentation is carried out in small temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks. After fermentation is complete, barrel aging takes place in our dedicated, dual-level Reserve barrel rooms. Barrel lots are aged separately for eight months before blending, and the final blend is aged an additional 14 months.