This is Tulocay Winery in Napa Valley California. While many Napa wineries
make thousands of cases of wine. our Winery makes hand crafted, zinfandel,
cabernet , chardonnay, merlot and pinot noir from some of the finest
vineyards in Napa Valley, CA. It is a Napa winery much smaller and intimate.
Winery tour of our Napa valley property can be arranged.

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Cabernet Sauvignon
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 Cabernet Sauvignon

Tulocay Rancho Sarco Cabernet Sauvignon

(Photo courtesy of the Napa Wine Project.)

Rancho Sarco Vineyard

The boss has been buying grapes from the Rancho Sarco Vineyard, located in the cool Coombsville District just north of the winery about two miles, since 2002. Like Chateau Haut Brion just outside the city of Bordeaux, it is surrounded by housing tracts. And like Chateau Haut Brion, it produces incredible Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Rancho Sarco Vineyard is owned and farmed by the Nord family, with whom the boss has had a relationship for nearly a decade. In the production of fine wines, a strong understanding must exist between grape grower and wine producer.

The 2002 is representative of a cool microclimate Napa Valley Cabernet produced in the Tulocay style: Fully extracted, lean, much like an old-fashioned Médoc, and destined to last decades.

In 2006, the vineyard produced a more atypical, ultra-ripe wine of 15.1% alcohol. Only 225 cases were bottled. It earned a Double Gold Medal in the 2009 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Unfortunately, only 230 cases made.

The Nord family has put up quite a bit of information on the Rancho Sarco Vineyard here.

Cliff Vineyard

Since 1981 Tulocay has offered one Cabernet Sauvignon from a single source, the Cliff Vineyard. It's located a few miles north of the winery in the hills at the end of the Old Soda Springs Road. This puts the vineyard somewhere between the Atlas Peak and Stags Leap viticultural districts.

Our 2002 Cliff Cabernet follows in the same tradition as the vintages preceding it... in other words, full throttle Napa Valley Cabernet.

Some folks like to drink our Cliff Vineyard Cabernet young. Others prefer to lay it down for five, ten or twenty years to let it soften up a bit. Either way, the Cliff is a Napa Cabernet that creates memories.

Della's Vineyard

There's a lot going on here. Most Cabernets bottled these days reach their peak at about six years of age, if not sooner. At eight years of age, the 2002 Della's is just now beginning to show. Age-worthy Napa Valley Cabernet for under $30 a bottle? Who woulda thunk it?

"God made Cabernet Sauvignon, whereas the devil made Pinot Noir." — André Tchelistcheff

"If Gregory Peck was a grape, he would be Cabernet Sauvignon. Noble, suave, immensely charming and massively ageworthy cabernet is the stallion of style that raises the standard for all around it. In fact, that's just it with cabernet sauvignon; it's the noblest of the noble grapes, the prince against which all kinds of manners and flavours and desires are compared.... A date with a great bottle of cabernet sauvignon is like a bedroom rendezvous with royalty." — Aussie wine writer Campbell Mattinson

“My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.” — conservative columnist Peggy Noonan

"Cabernet Sauvignon is the black Labrador of wines — it comes up and licks you." — Napa Valley winemaker Scott Rich

"In Napa Valley we talk about many different things, but cabernet is king. Everything I'm tasting now is wonderful. There is finesse and elegance. You'll find wines with unbelievably dark, intense color."
— Napa Valley winemaker Greg Fowler

The 2004 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons

For the majority of Tulocay's existence — some 30-plus years now — our policy has been to single-vineyard bottle all our Cabernets. But for the 2004 vintage, we discovered that blending the three vineyards from which we source our Cabernet — Rossi, Rancho Sarco and Cliff — led to a sum greater than the parts.

This Cabernet is still a pup — visualize a young Labrador retriever only beginning to show his future as a great hunter. It has a long way 'til full development — very much in the style for which Tulocay is known. Set it aside in a cool, dark cellar. Forget it for 10 or 15 years. Then open it to realize what real Cabernet Sauvignon — not the corporate-made stuff — is like.

All of our cabernet grapes come from the cooler, southeastern portion of the Napa Valley, which yields wines of great balance and purity of flavor. Then we age the wines in American and French oak barrels. Because the wines are neither fined nor filtered, they often throw a sediment.

— Skippy, Chief Cellar Rat

 

 



Tulocay Winery

1426 Coombsville Road • Napa, CA 94558

Phone: (707) 255-4064
Email: bill@tulocay.com or skippy@tulocay.com

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Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, Merlot, Syrah and Pinot Noir
from our Napa Valley winery, made the old fashioned way

 Tulocay Wines
Napa, California