Napa Valley Cabernet 2021: Top wines from Rutherford & St Helena

Napa Cabernet 2021: Full vintage report and top-scoring wines

Rutherford

The 2021 growing season turned out an ideal vintage for Napa Valley’s Rutherford producers and an especially good year for those who love the region’s calling card, ‘Rutherford dust’ spice aromas and grainy-dusty tannin profile.

In this dry year, Rutherford growers fared among the best of all the AVAs in the valley, producing a crop of wines widely viewed to have exceptional ageing potential. Like much of Napa in this drought year, 2021 saw an early growth spurt for the vines, followed by veraison in early July, culminating in fewer, smaller, and more concentrated berries developing evenly and smoothly.

This allowed for a picture-perfect harvest, with producers taking advantage of the opportunity for multiple passes through the vineyards to select optimally ripe berries.

It proved to be a tremendous recipe for capturing ripeness, power, and concentration without sacrificing acidity, structure, and (more importantly for Rutherford dust fans) terroir-specific nuance.

Scroll down for the top-scoring Rutherford & St Helena 2021 Cabernets

Rutherford at a glance

Climate:

Rutherford is still marginally influenced by early morning fog, its western bench area is cooler, with less late afternoon sun, tempered by afternoon marine winds. Many vineyard sites are above the fog line, providing warmer nights and cooler days than the valley floor.

Soils:

Its famous western benchland is comprised of sedimentary, gravelly-sandy and alluvial soils. The eastern side has more volcanic soils, moderately deep and more fertile.

Elevation:

155 to 500 feet (47 to 152 metres)

Rutherford 2021: the top-performing producers:

• Scarecrow
• Bella Oaks
• Inglenook
• Quintessa

St Helena

The St. Helena AVA, which fans out north and south around the pinching middle of Napa Valley’s ‘hourglass’ shape from the Vaca and Mayacamas mountains, which nearly come together north of the town centre, typically offers up ripe, sultry expressions of its sunny and warmer terroir.

However, 2021 added layers of complexity to the St. Helena style, partly due to the drought conditions. Back in 2020, cleansing rainfall in November and December was desperately needed and critical because that short bout of rain (following terrible fires) was succeeded by dry weather.

Less than 33 centimetres of rain fell through the entire remainder of the growing cycle.

While subsequent heat spells were rarer and short-lived in 2021, warm weather between bud break and bloom set meant vines in the St. Helena AVA sent out fewer shoots, resulting in smaller clusters and below-average yields (down as much as fifteen per cent from the previous 2020 vintage).

But the harvest was so even-keeled that some producers reported picking in eight separate passes, capturing anything and everything on offer by the grapes in this vintage, from increased acidity and lower alcohol levels to silky, ripe tannins and dense, dark fruit flavours.

The 2021s from St. Helena can be stunning, with ample depth of flavour balanced by vivacity and enough structure to suggest that this vintage might include some of the AVA’s most potentially long-lived reds.

St Helena at a glance

Climate:

Due to greater protection from western hills, St Helena is warmer with less fog or wind incursions from the Bay. This narrowest part of the Napa Valley floor reflects more heat off the hillsides.

Soils:

South and west borders are more sedimentary, gravel-clay soils; further north and to the east, soils are volcanic in origin.

Elevation:

200 to 475 feet (61 to 145 m)

St Helena 2021: the top-performing producers:

• Schrader Cellars
• B Cellars
• TOR Wines
• Corison
• Vice Versa

Cristaldi’s value picks from these appellations:

Frog’s Leap, Estate Grown Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, 2021

Black Stallion Estate Winery, Collector Edition Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, 2021

Grgich Hills Estate, Miljenko’s Selection, Rutherford, 2021

Whitehall Lane Millennium MM Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, 2021

Sleeping Giant, Inglewood Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, St. Helena, 2021

Corison Cabernet Sauvignon, St. Helena, 2021

Schrader Cellars, LPV Beckstoffer Las Piedras Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, St. Helena, 2021

Rutherford & St Helena 2021: the top-scoring Cabernets

Related articles

• Napa Valley Cabernet 2021: Full report and buying guide 
• Napa Cabernet 2021: Score table
• Napa Valley Cabernet 2021: Top wines from Rutherford & St Helena