william hill cabernet sauvignon 2024 review

Russell Bevan, who makes wine for his own Bevan Cellars in Napa Valley and consults for several other wineries including Taub Family, says he and his clients bottled only 31 out of 230 wines from 2020, and most of the 31 were whites. Winemakers found the vintage extremely challenging in certain vineyard districts, and wine marketers didn’t want to risk the damage to their brand images that negative media and trade judgments might cause if smoky wines got into circulation.įor example, Nickel & Nickel in Oakville, a specialist in vineyard-designated Cabernet, produced only six of the company’s usual 20-plus bottlings in 2020, due to smoke concerns. Despite the many 90-plus-point wines produced, hundreds of the usual high-scoring bottlings were missing. “Very good” is the qualitative term for an 88 rating. Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2020 gets a score of 88 on the Wine Enthusiast Vintage Chart, the first time since 2011 that the vintage rating dipped below 90. The main news is that there are much fewer offerings than usual from some leading wineries. These are pertinent issues now because the 2020 vintage of Napa Valley and Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon is rolling out winery by winery in late 2023. She explains that volatile phenols, the compounds in smoke that affect a wine’s taste, are not toxic. No known health risks are lurking in the 2020 wines either, according to Anita Oberholster, extension professor of enology at the University of California, Davis. This is largely because winemakers identified the smoke-affected grapes and newly fermented wines and chose not to put them on the market unless they could be corrected by processing. Our blind tastings to date of 97 Napa- and Sonoma-grown Cabernet Sauvignons submitted for review turned up no bottles with the blatant ashtray smell and doused campfire aftertaste that can make smoke-tainted wines undrinkable. (Reds, which are fermented with their skins, are a different story.) White wines were generally not problematic since many of them were harvested before the fires, and whites are not fermented in contact with grape skins, which are what absorb smoke from the air. However, surprisingly little of this shows up in the 2020 products that were eventually bottled and sold.

A significant portion of grapes and wine made from the vintage exhibited smoke effects during the harvest and fermentation period. Several firefighters and residents died and thousands of structures were destroyed, including winery facilities. The wildfires did have a major, disruptive economic and health impact on people who live and work in the wine regions.

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William hill cabernet sauvignon 2024 review