Cardinale Cabernet Sauvignon 2015

Professional Ratings

• 97 Jeb Dunnuck
  The 2015 Cardinale is heavenly juice made from 91% Cabernet Sauvignon and 9% Merlot that’s from a number of AVAs in Napa Valley. It offers a beautiful perfume of crème de cassis, black raspberry jam, graphite, and scorched earth. This gives way to a full-bodied, elegant, impressively concentrated 2015 that has the deep, concentrated fruit of the vintage, yet stays fresh, lively and graceful on the palate. This is high-class stuff that can be drunk anytime over the coming 20-25 years.
• 97 Tasting Panel
  Ripe plum nose; dense and dark with a velvety texture and complex flavors of spice, chocolate, and black cherry. Intense but always refined and elegant, this is yet another Chris Carpenter masterpiece.
• 96 Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
  Deep garnet-purple colored, the 2015 Cardinale Cabernet Sauvignon (containing 10% Merlot) gives beautiful red, black and blue fruit notes with touches of dried herbs, spice cake and unsmoked cigars, plus a waft of cedar. Medium to full-bodied, it has a firm structure with plenty of gregarious mid-palate fruit, finishing with a lingering herbal lift. This seductive blockbuster is temptingly drinkable now and it should age gracefully over 15-20 years. 2,579 cases produced.
  Rating: 96+
• 94 Decanter
  The aim of Cardinale is to be accessible, though not mature, on release, as well as having the capacity to age, and this 2015 succeeds admirably. There's dense blackberry fruit on the nose, which has power and ripeness without being jammy or overbearing. The mostly new oak is evident on the nose, and the palate, but it's sumptuous and integrated. Plump and full-bodied, the wine is understandably youthful and quite grippy, but it's not too extracted, and the long finish is juicy and vigorous.
• 93 Wine Spectator
  A ripe, juicy, seemingly forward style, with mouthfilling plum and blackberry compote notes before the back end delivers gutsy black licorice, chocolate and roasted apple wood flavors that will need some time in the cellar to integrate fully. Has the energy to pull everything together.