2014 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon: A Dark Horse Emerges

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | JANUARY 21, 2025

This retrospective of the 2014 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons was one of the most fascinating I have done in a long time. Sandwiched between 2013 and 2015, 2014 has always lived outside the limelight. At age ten, however, 2014 is having a moment. I tasted many exceptional 2014s that will give wines from more renowned vintages a run for their money, and some that will eclipse them entirely.

It’s a fabulous vintage for consumers who want to dip into their cellars and for sommeliers looking for wines that are ready to drink. My impression has always been that this vintage did not sell through as well as some of the neighboring vintages, so I will not at all be surprised if some producers still have inventory.

Ric Forman’s 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon is one of the highlights of the vintage.

2014: What About Now?

The long and short of it is that 2014 is a superb Napa Valley vintage that is at its peak today.  The wines are aromatic, savory and incredibly expressive, offering both the complexity of a decade’s worth of age and enough freshness to drink well for years to come. Most importantly, the wines have aged exceptionally well, far better than the 2013s. More on that below. Quality is consistently high. The only thing 2014 lacks is perhaps a few more stars at the very top, but a tradeoff that favors consistency is probably more important, as that resonates in many more wines. As has always been the case, the 2014s offer an attractive mix of the mid-weight structure of 2012 with the dark flavors and savory intensity of 2013, the exact combination varying from wine to wine.

Colgin’s IX Estate, Pritchard Hill.

I started tasting the 2014s in Spring 2015. More comprehensive tastings followed in the Fall of that year, when I reviewed the 2014s from barrel and the 2013s from bottle. At the time, I liked the 2014s a great deal. I thought the wines shared some attributes with the 2013s and that they had a bit more energy but also less volume than their older siblings. Many, if not most, 2014s shut down hard after botting to a degree I have not seen before. From bottle, so many wines were less impressive than they had been from barrel, leading me to believe that perhaps I had overrated the vintage. Today, years later, the wines have finally awakened. In so many 2014s, I finally rediscovered that same excitement from years ago when the wines were in barrel.

Readers who want to revisit my initial thoughts on 2014 and surrounding vintages will find plenty of information below, along with my current thinking on 2013, a vintage that turned out to be much more inconsistent than I originally envisaged.

Brad Grimes made some of the most compelling wines of 2014 at Abreu.

2014 – Hot On The Heels Of 2013, Revisited

This is an excerpt from my article 2013 Napa Valley: Once Upon a Time in America…, which covered the nascent 2014s and bottled 2013s.

After the precocious 2013 growing season, no one expected another record-breaking early harvest, but then 2014 arrived and all bets were off. Budbreak was early by as much as six weeks. Perhaps even more surprisingly, yields were high in 2014, at the time the third year of the current drought cycle. I remember spending a week in Napa Valley in mid-April and hearing producers explain that the vines were setting themselves up for an abundant crop. And that is exactly what happened. The harvest also turned out to be even earlier than 2013, but the season was quite balanced. What little rain there was fell at the right time. Once again, my fall trips coincided with the harvest, and I was able to get a first-hand look at the action. In some cases, estates had all of their Cabernet in by the end of September, which was unheard of…at the time.

In the cellar, the wines were slow to extract, so most producers kept the wines on the skins a bit longer than normal. Despite the early start of the season and drought conditions, the 2014s maintained gorgeous acidity, freshness and overall energy. We shot quite a bit of video that fall, all of which is available here: Explore the 2014 Napa Valley Harvest Video Archive.

The 2014s are distinctly mineral and savory, with less mid-palate intensity and depth than the 2013s. I started tasting the 2014s this past spring, as is my custom. Since then, the wines have only grown in stature and overall complexity. Quality at the top estates is superb. A year ago, I thought 2014 would turn about to be a sort of combination of 2012 and 2013, but the wines have now moved in a direction that is far closer to 2013, albeit with less overt richness. My sense is that 2014 will hold considerable appeal to readers with classically leaning palates. The best wines are breathtakingly beautiful.

Readers will find additional context on 2014 vis-à-vis 2015 and 2016 in my article Napa Valley Trilogy: 2014, 2015 & 2016.

Erin and Massimo di Costanzo’s Cabernet Sauvignon Farella Vineyard is among the wines that were slow to recover after bottling. Today, it is one of the stars of the vintage.

2013: Closing Thoughts

The uneven performance of the 2013s has been on my mind a great deal since my retrospective of those wines last year. It was such an exciting vintage in the early days. The wines were dense, potent and so structured. My expectation was of a truly epic vintage. Unfortunately, over time, 2013 has turned out to be inconsistent. Many wines are maturing at a relatively fast pace, certainly faster than what should be expected in a top vintage. What happened?

It's easy to say that fruit was picked too ripe. That’s a superficial analysis, in my view. In retasting many wines and discussing them with producers, I think the wines were simply handled too much in the cellar. Winemakers probably feared excessively dark, tannic Cabernets that would never come around, so they took steps to make them softer. In time, those techniques, such as giving wines greater exposure to oxygen, resulted in some 2013s that are maturing faster than they should. Less tinkering would have probably been better. To be sure, the 2014s don’t give that impression at all.

Tasting the complete set of BOND 2014s.

I tasted most the wines in this report in Fall 2024, with a few follow-up tastings in early 2025. I also included a few wines from neighboring appellations in Sonoma that focus on Bordeaux varieties.

© 2025, Vinous. No portion of this article may be copied, shared or re-distributed without prior consent from Vinous. Doing so is not only a violation of our copyright, but also threatens the survival of independent wine criticism.

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