Lot 360 | 2010 Napa Valley

Lot 360 is a huge wine structurally and one of our most cellarable wines yet it’s beautifully perfumed now with a piercing raspberry and blackberry “robe”, spicy plum and floral notes underpinned with coffee and dark chocolate. The mid-palate is tightly wound and dense with expansive tannins revealing supple red and black fruits and lengthy notes of chocolate and earth. The wine has excellent persistence and length but will clearly benefit from a couple years of cellaring. Be certain to decant this for a good hour or two, in fact, this is an ideal wine for a 24 hour overnight decant (decant for an hour or two and then funnel back into the bottle. Cork the wine and let it sit overnight). Huge structure. Grab a case or two folks and enjoy this gorgeous Howell Mountain Cabernet over the next 20 years.

Howell Mountain isn’t really a mountain, but rather an elevated plateau of volcanic ash (tuff), loam and iron-rich red clay pushed up by volcanic activity just east of Napa Valley. These nutrient deprived soils result in small, tightly packed clusters of Cabernet grapes with tremendous structure and intensity (in large part due to the lower ratio of skin to pulp). Elevation is another saving grace, keeping the fruit above the fogline (1400 feet) but also relatively cool versus the typically 10-degrees warmer temperatures that the Napa Valley floor sees in the late afternoon. This combination of lean soils, elevation, and cooling breezes that originate in the Petaluma Gap and blow through St Helena are what give Howell Mountain its signature “intensity” both in terms of perfume, structure and tremendous ageability. Lot 360 2010 Howell Mountain Cabernet is our first release since Lot 253 and a quantitative step up in quality given its sourcing from an over $120/bottle producer.