92/100 - Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate
91/100 - James Suckling

A drive along the Silverado Trail through Rutherford is a journey through Napa Valley winemaking history.  This 100% Cabernet Sauvignon has aromas and flavors that are varied, multiple, and concentrated with black currant, black cherry, and raspberry sorbet with hints of Rutherford dust. This very traditional Cabernet Sauvignon shows discrete and fleeting hints of fine herb. This leads to an intense concentration of fruit together with spice, vanilla bean, and toasted oak. The texture is firm, rich, and pleasingly full-bodied with a long finish. Today the vineyards boast new clones and advanced systems of cultivation and trellising that enhance both quality and yields from the gravelly loam soils. It naturally benefits from its unique combination of higher temperatures and cooling marine influences, yielding a distinctive earthiness, or “dust”, and bright red fruit notes with intriguing complexity.  Frisson lays claim to rows in the heart of this appellation, well placed in the famed Rutherford Bench.  

Pairings: Grilled barbeque rib eye steak, braised short ribs, roast lamb with rosemary.