Special price $225 | regular $250
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Mayacamas isn't just old for Napa, it's practically ancient by American wine standards. The vineyard was first planted in 1889 high on Mt. Veeder, and the estate's defining chapter began in 1968, when Bob Travers bought the property. Travers had no formal winemaking background, he learned the craft directly under Joe Heitz, one of the founding fathers of modern Napa Cabernet, and he built Mayacamas into something deliberately out of step with the rest of the valley. While Napa chased riper fruit and more new oak through the decades, Travers kept making Mayacamas the old way: high elevation, cool mountain fruit picked for structure and acidity rather than power, fermented and aged in decades-old redwood vats and neutral barrels with little to no new oak. It's austere, mineral, built for the long haul, the closest thing California has to a genuinely old-world mountain Cabernet, and collectors have chased it for exactly that reason for over 50 years.
The 2006 comes from fruit grown high on Mt. Veeder, mostly Cabernet Sauvignon with small amounts of Merlot and Cabernet Franc rounding it out, and it's textbook Mayacamas: wild raspberry and blackberry fruit, a firm mountain backbone, and enough structure that it was considered almost unapproachable in its youth.
Drinking window
This is where the patience finally pays off. Early reviews from its youth described the 2006 as tough, lean, and gripped by young, forceful tannins, exactly what you'd expect from a wine built to age for decades. Now, at nearly 20 years old, recent tastings describe it as bursting with energy and drinking beautifully, with tannins finally in a great place. This is a wine that's spent most of its life closed down and is only now stepping into its true window.
If you're opening a bottle tonight, decant for 1 to 2 hours. Mayacamas serves its wines cool, around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so pull the cork, decant, and let it sit somewhere on the cooler side rather than at full room temperature, that keeps the mountain fruit fresh and lifted rather than letting the alcohol and structure dominate. Still, there's no urgency to drink through your bottles quickly either, Mayacamas Cabernets from this era are famous for holding gracefully for 30 to 40 years or more, so this window is wide open.
