Napa's Cult Cabernets: Screaming Eagle, Harlan, and Opus One

For most of the twentieth century, the world's greatest red wines were assumed to come from France. Then, over the span of a single generation, a small group of estates in California's Napa Valley upended that assumption, producing Cabernet Sauvignon of such intensity and polish that collectors began to chase it as fiercely as any First Growth. These are the cult cabernets, and they redrew the map of fine wine.

The archetype is Screaming Eagle, a tiny property whose wines, first made in the 1990s, became almost instantly legendary. Production is minuscule, the wine is sold almost entirely through a private mailing list with a years long waiting period, and bottles that do reach the open market command extraordinary sums. A single large format bottle once sold at a Napa charity auction for half a million dollars, a moment that announced to the world that California could play at the very highest level. Harlan Estate, founded with the explicit ambition of creating a Napa wine to rival a Bordeaux First Growth, followed a similar path, as did a small constellation of others, among them Colgin, Scarecrow, and Bryant Family.

Slightly different in spirit is Opus One, born in 1979 of a partnership between the Napa pioneer Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe de Rothschild of Château Mouton Rothschild, a union of California ambition and Bordeaux pedigree. Its striking estate and its Bordeaux style blend made it one of the first Napa wines to be treated as a genuine luxury good, and it remains among the valley's most recognized names.

What unites the cult cabernets is a philosophy of scarcity. Most are made in tiny quantities from carefully chosen hillside sites, sold not through shops but through allocation, and priced from the very first vintage as luxury objects rather than mere wines. Their style, too, tends to share a common thread, ripe and richly concentrated, powerful yet polished, a distinctly Californian expression of Cabernet that is unmistakable beside its more restrained Bordeaux cousins.

For collectors, the cult cabernets present both an opportunity and a challenge. The wines have a strong and growing following and a record of holding their value, yet the mailing lists that control them can take years to join, and much of the finest wine never reaches a shop at all. Access, as so often in fine wine, is everything, and it rewards the same patient approach set out in our guide to starting a fine wine collection. To pursue an allocation or source older vintages, contact us.