Far Niente Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2022
£101.75
The wine
A refined and smooth Cabernet Sauvignon, with elegant notes of dark plum and red cherry layered with liquorice, spice, black tea and toasted oak through to a plush and silky palate with a long, polished finish.
The estate farms 80 hectares across three Napa sites, on what is widely held to be some of the finest viticultural land in California. Prohibition closed the winery for over sixty years, and its restoration from 1979 is part of the wider story of how Napa recovered to become what it is.
The producer
Far Niente
View all Far Niente winesFar Niente takes its name from the Italian phrase dolce far niente, how sweet it is to do nothing. Founded in 1885, it flourished until Prohibition and was then abandoned for over sixty years before Gil Nickel bought it in 1979 and began a long restoration.
Prohibition is the great rupture in American wine. Between 1920 and 1933 commercial winemaking was effectively illegal, hundreds of wineries closed and vineyards were pulled up or replanted to thick-skinned grapes that could survive shipment for home winemaking. California took half a century to recover, and estates like this one, resurrected from ruins, are a large part of how it did.
The estate now farms 80 hectares across three Napa sites and makes only Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon under its own name, alongside Dolce, a botrytised sweet wine from Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc that is among the very few American wines made in the manner of Sauternes.
