Keenan 2018 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

The Wine

Clearly evident from the moment this deep and opaque wine hits the glass are the hints of big fruit notes. Aromas climb from savory blueberry and French roast coffee toward pleasant minerality that leads into the finishing tannins, which promise a long life if you have the will power to avoid popping this cork anytime soon. But no worries if you can't muster such restraint - even in its relative youth, the tannins manage to feel silken and restrained.

The Winery

I fondly recall my first, very brief sighting of the Keenan estate, high atop Spring Mountain Road above Napa Valley. It was a weekend that I'd swapped cars with a friend who owned a Porsche, which provided the expected thrill that comes with driving such a fine-tuned machine with your bottom seemingly inches from the ground. That car eagerly gobbled up each twist and turn as I took it up Spring Mountain Road on a perfect summer day with a piercingly blue sky interrupted only by the occasional cumulus. Needless to say, my first Keenan sighting went by in a blur.

The Keenan estate is the current resident of a ghost winery whose demise was the result of an overdose of the recalled moral experiment known as prohibition. The winery sat, vacant and abandoned until Robert Keenan rebuilt it in 1974, re-planting the same mountaintop vineyard originally inhabited by the vines of the old winery, almost 60 years earlier.

Robert's first wine, released in 1977, provided the foundation for his reputation as a producer of small lots of intense, concentrated Cabernet, Merlot and Chardonnay. In 2006 the winery became Solar Powered and sustainably farmed, meaning their grapes are grown without synthetic chemicals or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Sustainable farming refers to the ability of a farm to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health.