Freemark Abbey

Freemark Abbey dates to 1886, when it was founded by Josephine Tychson, an intrepid Victorian widow and one of the first female winemakers in California. Its modern identity was set in 1939, when three partners, Charles Freeman, Markquand Foster and Abbey Ahern, combined their names to make the one on the label.

The estate holds a particular place in American wine history: it was the only winery to have both a red and a white in the 1976 Judgement of Paris, the blind tasting in which Californian wines beat the finest of France and upended the wine world's assumptions overnight.

The two single-vineyard Cabernets are the wines to know. Bosché in Rutherford has been bottled separately since 1970, one of the first vineyard-designated Cabernets in Napa, and Sycamore sits alongside it. Both come from the Rutherford bench, the gravelly alluvial fan on the valley's western side that gives the dusty tannic character growers call Rutherford dust.