Quintessa Rutherford Napa Proprietary Red 2020 750 ML

98 points Decanter

Here is one of the stars of this challenging vintage. A muscular wine, leading with tremendous freshness on the palate, restrained red-toned fruit, and very subtle yet elegant cedar wood intermixed with red-rock minerality. Medium to full-bodied, offering more black fruit on the palate, redolent of muddled blackberries and juicy plums. An iron fist in a velvet glove comes to mind, given the tannin texture, which leads with the furry, velvety side of the glove and transitions to an undercurrent of ironclad and dusty minerals. All this turns fresh and lively through the finish. Perhaps a bit hot on the alcohol, but this will soften soon enough—absolutely one of the more riveting wines of the entire vintage. I had the chance to taste this wine at Quintessa with Rebekah Wineburg, Winemaker and Rodrigo Soto, General Manager, and it was the last in a lineup of wines going back to the 1994 vintage, and it showed all I have written -- Wineburg and Soto are so finely in tuned with Quintessa’s vineyards that it’s almost no surprise they devised such a beautiful wine through such a difficult year, battling fires and dealing with obstacles related to the pandemic. Seek this out. (JC)