2014 Rivers-Marie Cabernet Sauvignon Panek Vineyard
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Tasting Notes
The 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon Panek Vineyard is another sensational wine that marries serious richness and intensity with incredible symmetry, purity, and elegance. From a valley floor site north of St. Helena brought up in 75% new French oak, it offers an awesome bouquet of crème de cassis, blueberries, crushed flowers, violets, toasty oak and incense that develops and changes with time in the glass. Possessing perfectly ripe tannin, full-bodied richness, the sexy, frontend loaded charm of the vintage, and no hard edges, this sensational Cabernet Sauvignon could come from nowhere else than Napa Valley. Drink it anytime over the coming 20 years.
Critic Scores
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Robert Parker, Wine Advocate
Jeb Dunnuck
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Thomas Rivers Brown does a fabulous job with the 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon Panek Vineyard, which is not that far from Vineyard 29's Aida on the valley floor just to the south of Larkmeade, north of St. Helena and the Culinary Institute of America. This is another sensational effort that flirts with perfection. Seventy-five percent new French oak was utilized for 20 months of aging, before the wine was bottle unfined and unfiltered. Opaque purple with notes of blueberry, black raspberry, incense, camphor and forest floor, the wine has an fabulous richness on the palate, a front-end-loaded appeal, but then carries through in the midpalate and finish with light tannin and good acidity. This is a sensational, sexy, up-front Cabernet Sauvignon to drink over the next 20 years while waiting for the 2013 to hit its peak.