Favia, Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville, California, 2019

Overview of the Wine
Favia Erickson Winegrowers is first a collaboration. 

We are partners, a family, a team. And there is our home — a house and cellar, gardens and fruit trees: a collaboration that has meandered across generations, its stone first laid by Napa Valley’s earliest Italian immigrants. Our collaboration then wends outward and into the neighboring hills, visiting familiar vines and their tending hands. In these vineyards, curiosity and humility assemble to listen closely to the history of ancient soils, the natural currents of the everyday, and the myriad voices of those who foster the patient growth and harvest of our grapes. Favia is a celebration of a place and its people.

Time, too, is our partner, immense and inexorable. We encounter millennia in the volcanic upheaval of our surrounds. Our vines enunciate the intricacies of the four seasons. Our stone cellar echoes with memory of vintages a century past. And finally, our work rests in barrel, quietly finding its voice over years. At its center, our work is a partnership with Nature. With reverence, we usher our bounty toward a new expression; we seek to bottle a glimpse of a time and place.

Favia is the ever-resonant telling of a story still being written.

Grape / Blend
100% Cabernet Sauvignon

Origin
Oakville, Napa Valley, California

Winemaker's Tasting Notes
There is logic behind the fact that Oakville has become the most heralded slice of Napa Valley (the “tenderloin,” as Robert Parker has called it). Our blocks at Oakville Ranch—high above the eastern edge of the Valley, organically farmed on red, rocky, iron-rich soils—have produce some of the most compelling wines in the area for many years. It is these red hillsides that continue to astound us year after year, the wines having such power, intensity, and strength of character.

98 Points - J. D'Angelo
The 2019 Oakville Cabernet is another utterly brilliant wine from Favia. It immediately bursts open with tricking aromatics of ripe black berries and black currants, which are laced with graphite, florals, exotic spices and dusty gravel nuances which all emerge beautifully from the glass. On the palate this possesses a gorgeous full body, that is impeccably structure and polished, with outstanding overall depth and focus. This continues to impress as it displays a remarkable combination of concentration and precision all the way through the long resonating finish. This is an absolutely stunning wine that is already extremely impressive today, however it will only become even more compelling as it evolves over the next two decades.

97 points - James Suckling
Lots of lead pencil, blackberry, pine needle and some resin. Full-bodied, yet tight and focused, with tight, velvety tannins. Bitter chocolate and some toasted oak. Pepper, too. Drinkable now, but give it three or four years for the tannins to soften. Better after 2026.

97 points - Vinous
Another standout in this range, the 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville is a huge, potent wine. Bright acids and veins of tannin confer power to this brooding, sumptuous Cabernet from Oakville Ranch. Dark red purplish fruit, rose petal, spice, cedar and crushed rocks all lend vibrancy throughout. The 2019 has turned out beautifully. 

Product size: 750ml