Napa Cabernet 2020: Vintage report and top recommendations

After what turned out to be a difficult and traumatic growing season across California, those who were able to did manage to produce many high-quality wines, albeit often in small quantity, as our expert summary reveals. Follow advice where you can, and consider drinking rather than keeping long term.

By Jonathan Cristaldi

last updated 8 December 2023

in Tastings

Napa Cabernet 2020 vintage rating: 3.5 stars

The wines often show the warmth of the vintage, with rich, riper red fruits, dusty mineral notes, and burly, almost rustic tannins due to heat spikes. Many are medium- to full-bodied, compact and rather tight at the pull of the cork. They gain in volume and soften with decanting.

Napa’s 2020 vintage is very much about farming choices and location. The growing season began with a dry winter; early rains reduced crop yields. Two fires impacted the region in the middle of the growing season.

Still, the vast majority of producers who bottled any Cabernet Sauvignon harvested their grapes before the second fire, which erupted on 27 September.

Despite all the challenges, wine lovers will find plenty to admire among the wines I have recommended here. Now three years on, having had good time to settle in the bottle, these are wines to drink now and often.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for the top 34 Napa Cabernet 2020 wines

Individual AVA posts:

Rutherford | Oakville | Coombsville | St Helena | Stags Leap District

The short version of the 2020 growing season in Napa is best summed up in one stark reality: compared to a typical vintage, only half the quantity of wines were produced.

Indeed, many wineries opted not to produce wine at all. When it came to assessing the 2020 wines earlier this year, apart from one large organised event at which I was able to taste 80 wines, even finding out who had actually made wine and was willing to send out samples was a challenge, and understandably so.

The 60 other wines I was able to try were therefore tasted over several months, many on an individual basis.

Cropped-DEC290.napa_2020.estate_vineyards_fay.jpg

Those who did make Cabernet Sauvignon, or any wine for that matter, did so with great care and were methodical in their approach, given the tumultuous conditions of both the hot growing season and all the complexities of adjusting to Covid pandemic restrictions for cellar work.

Luck and timing

While the two intense fires mark the 2020 vintage in Napa Valley, nearly every producer who did choose to bottle a Cabernet, and whom I interviewed, relied heavily on testing their wines for any evidence of smoke issues, or the presence of glycosides (sugars bound to volatile smoke phenols). It is a vineyard-by-vineyard issue.

The Cabernets that show best are simply the lucky ones: those harvested from vineyards least impacted by the fires. And while good scores tell part of the story, it is not the whole story. Simply put, it’s complicated.

Cropped-DEC290.napa_2020.wesley_steffens.jpg — Wesley Steffens, director and associate winemaker for Vineyard 7 & 8.

Wine is, after all, an agricultural product. As with any crop, its growth potential is determined by all the factors at play in any given location – from degrees of smoke concentration and duration of exposure to wind direction, elevation, sun exposure and vine-row orientation. All of this, coupled with different pick dates, means there is more variation in both style and quality in 2020.

Wesley Steffens, director and associate winemaker for Vineyard 7 & 8, told me: ‘We made a beautiful 2020 Cabernet, though a fraction of what we would have, as we lost nearly 70% of our fruit to smoke. The Cabernet we did produce was harvested just days before the Glass Fire broke out and enveloped Spring Mountain [just a few km away towards St Helena]. Sadly all was on track to be a gorgeous vintage.’

Value & quality: Cristaldi’s 2020 Napa top picks

Covenant Wines, Napa Valley

Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, FAY, Stags Leap District

Morlet Family Vineyards, Coeur de Vallée, Oakville

Choose advisedly

With uncharacteristically warm temperatures in late winter 2020, early spring saw the mercury reaching above 15°C, even climbing above 21°C, a trend that continued well into November, with summertime highs averaging between 26°C and 32°C, and at least three significant heat spikes above 37°C in August and in September.

But two fire events remain the defining factors of the season. The LNU Complex Fire ignited on 17 August, and the Glass Fire began on 27 September. While so many producers remained optimistic after the LNU fire that they’d avoid smoke issues, the intensity and proximity of the Glass Fire, which erupted on a hill just north of St Helena, dashed any hopes for those who still had fruit on the vine longer than a day or two after it ignited.

Cropped-DEC290.napa_2020.quintessa_vineyards.jpg

In such a vintage as this, what is the reader and the drinker of wines to do? While there is some uncertainty, I hope this report serves as a good gauge, and beyond the wines included here, consumers should seek out their favourite labels and, if produced and still available, buy them and drink them. If you have a questionable bottle, contact the winery and discuss it.

Some of the appellation highlights from my 2019 report, such as Calistoga, Howell Mountain, and Spring Mountain, returned so few wines in 2020 that I’ve focused on appellations with more wines produced; Coombsville, Oakville, Rutherford, St Helena and Stags Leap District are explored in slightly more detail and are among the best to seek out.

See the Napa Cabernet 2020 score table

Napa Cabernet 2020 recommendations

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Jonathan Cristaldi is a wine writer and critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more than a decade, his articles on wine, spirits and beer have appeared in a host of print and digital platforms, including Decanter, Food & Wine, Departures, The SOMM Journal, Tasting Panel Magazine, Liquor.com, Seven Fifty Daily, Los Angeles Magazine, Thrillist, Tasting Table and Time Out LA among others. When not writing about wine, Cristaldi works as a scriptwriter on film and documentary projects with award-winning commercial photographer and director Rachid Dahnoun.

Napa Cabernet 2020 vintage rating: 3.5 stars

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for the top 34 Napa Cabernet 2020 wines

Individual AVA posts:

Rutherford | Oakville | Coombsville | St Helena | Stags Leap District

Luck and timing

Value & quality: Cristaldi’s 2020 Napa top picks

Choose advisedly

See the Napa Cabernet 2020 score table

Napa Cabernet 2020 recommendations

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