There are a lot of good reasons why wines from the Napa Valley are so prized
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I first tasted the wines from Sequoia Grove in Napa in 1989 and it was love at first sip. There is probably no other winery I have gone back to so repeatedly over nearly four decades and never been disappointed by. Last week when my wife and I celebrated our anniversary dinner, we took another trip down memory lane to that California wine country trip with a bottle of the 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon, and 36 years after my first sip, it wasn’t as good as I remember—it was better. It was also a stark reminder that wines don’t have to be expensive to wow you, and in fact, I’ve recently had wines costing four times as much that weren’t nearly as good. Instead of chasing trends or adjusting flavor profiles to meet the taste of prominent critics—a long and not so rich tradition in the world of winemaking—the folks at Sequoia Grove have just kept doing it right, and that’s why these classic Napa wines keep getting better, yet remain great values.
Sequoia Grove was the first standout winery I ever visited in person, before I began writing about food and wine and spirits and travel for a living, and a few years later a special bottle I had purchased at the winery was purloined in a burglary of my New York City apartment—along with a bunch of stuff that was far more easily replaced. Yet despite this one sour memory, the winery has always held a special place in my own history, and that’s one of the reasons I periodically revisit it. Another is that it’s really, really good, affordable, and in the years when what it means to be a “Napa wine” has been greatly broadened and in some ways diminished, it is a wakeup call that you don’t need to be new to be good or interesting, you just need to be good and interesting, and Sequoia Grove is exactly that.
The understated Sequoia Grove Winery in Napa’s Rutherford.
Sequoia Grove Winery
Of course, it’s not stuck in the past or all business as usual, and over the past two decades the winery has strategically acquired more vineyards in some of the best subregions, three standout AVAs, Tonella Estate in Rutherford, State Lane in Yountville and Mount Veeder.
To me, the classic Napa wine is cabernet, and the classic Napa cab is big and full-bodied with lovely fruit, the perfect accompaniment to red meat, but it’s easy to go too far with this, and in many cases, pricey Napa cabs are tannic, too fruit forward, and big in a bludgeon style. But as soon as I took the first sip of the 2022 Sequoia Grove, it reminded me that it is still possible to be both big and elegant, and this is all the good things about Napa-style with none of the shortcomings. It just hits all the bases. It’s a full-bodied red that can be enjoyed with a much wider variety of foods, more like a pinot noir in terms of pairings yet much richer, and it doesn’t need fatty beef to balance the tannins (I previously wrote about a standout pinot noir producer for food pairings here at Forbes). It can even be enjoyed really nicely on its own, which is not at all common. It’s also a wine you can have right away or sit on for years, and the price just cannot be beat.
It would be hard to get more delicious wine bang for your buck than the 2022 Sequoia Grove Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
Sequoia Grove Winery
On the Sequoia Grove website they explained their house logic as: “Contrary to popular opinion, we believe that Cabernet Sauvignon is extremely versatile and can be paired with a variety of foods. Our wine pairing philosophy is simple: we emphasize crafting wines that are elegant, balanced, and adapt to a wide range of dishes. Our goal is to help you to feel confident to explore and experiment with the widest selection of culinary sensations possible.”
This is absolutely true. I like to make celebratory dinners by replicating dishes we have enjoyed in our travels, so for our anniversary I recreated a stunner we had in Marrakech, Moroccan braised beef with figs and dates, not a pairing you have to contemplate too often. Yes it is beef but it is also greatly sweetened by the fruit and layered with garlic and intense spices, ras el hanout, cinnamon and more. The wine was absolutely perfect.
I’ve had a few different things from Sequoia Grove over the years but the go-to label I’ve enjoyed on and off since 1989, and the one I had the other night, is the “basic” Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, the least expensive cab the winery produces. For the 2022 the MSRP is $55, but you can find it online for less than $40. In terms of value, it punches way above its weight class, on par with many popular label Napa Cabs in the $110-$150 range. Renowned wine critic Jeb Dunnuck wrote of the 2022, “A nicely textured, medium-bodied, incredibly satisfying Napa Valley Cabernet…It would be hard to find a better value-priced Cabernet Sauvignon in the vintage.” He means out of every wine produced that year in Napa, which is big statement.
Both Decanter magazine and the Tasting Panel magazine gave it a 94, while well-known critic James Sucking gave it a 92 point rating and noted on his site that the top 20 scoring American cabs he tasted this year all cost between $200-$800 a bottle to give some comparison. We’re talking about wines that cost twenty times as much, but I simply cannot imagine a world in which one tasted twenty times as good.
Decanter also agreed me with on two important points: “This wine is delicious straight from the bottle and well-suited for both immediate enjoyment and further ageing.”
The Napa Valley is one of the best wine country trips on the planet.
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Beyond the Cab, the winery’s big hitter is Chardonnay, a varietal I tend to avoid from Napa, where it has often been made into an overly buttery non-food wine, unlike French Chablis (always 100% chardonnay) which skews crisper, lighter, has more minerality, and generally makes for much better food pairings. The most recent 2023 Sequoia Grove is sort of in between New and Old World and is an excellent food wine with balanced acidity and a touch of salinity but still gives you a lot lovely Napa-style fruit. 2023 is shaping up to be a standout Chardonnay vintage in Napa, and Suckling gave this wine a 93-point rating, which is especially impressive considering you can get it for as little as $32.
I’d have trouble holding onto bottles of the 2022 Cab for the future even if I wanted to, because it’s so tasty it overrides self-control, but Sequoia Grove also makes several more collectible limited editions and single vineyard Cabs that cost two to three times as much, along with smaller amounts of other varietals, including Cabernet Franc and Syrah. If you get the chance to visit the Napa Valley I strongly encourage you to drop by this Rutherford winery, because it is a great opportunity to sample several of the rarer and pricier wines in a single sitting, including the chance to do a vertical tasting of their flagship collectible, Cambium.
But for those of us who do not have California wine country on our upcoming itineraries, it would be practically impossible for me to suggest a better taste of this terroir for your hard earned dollars than these “entry level” offerings that are anything but. If affordable luxury is something you appreciate or you want to splurge on your next dinner without really splurging at all, try these gold standards of Napa winemaking that have been receiving great reviews for decades.
Dining and Cooking