Twenty Years, and the Other Bottle Was Nine Months Old

Christian Moueix found Napanook in 1981. The vineyard sits west of Yountville on the alluvial bench below the Mayacamas, a site with a long history and, at the time, a reputation that had faded from it; he took a partnership in it the following year and became sole owner in 1995. The name of the wine is Latin — dominus, lord of the estate — and the label carries his signature rather than a château.

What sits on the site now is a long, low bar of stone in wire cages, built by Herzog & de Meuron and finished in the late nineties, designed so that light and air pass through the gaps in the stacked basalt. It is one of the few winery buildings anyone photographs for its own sake, and it is deliberately almost invisible from the valley floor.

An Unfashionable Year

2000 is the vintage in that stretch of Napa history nobody talks about. It sits between 1999 and 2001, both of which get cited, and it produced a large crop in a season with no drama in it — cool and even, apart from a brutal three-day heat spike in mid-June, and a compact harvest that finished around the middle of October, weeks earlier than the year before. Big crop, no adversity, no story: the combination that gets a vintage quietly filed away.

The wine that year was around eighty-three percent Cabernet Sauvignon with Cabernet Franc, Merlot and a little Petit Verdot behind it. It has generally been held to have done better than the vintage around it — which is the usual pattern for a site farmed for structure rather than for ripeness, in a year that offered neither extreme.

In the Glass

Opened at home over dinner at twenty years exactly, alongside a pot of abalone rice, grilled squid and a clam pasta — and alongside, in an ice sleeve, a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from the 2020 harvest, which had been in bottle for a matter of months. Two decades apart, on one small round table.

The colour had gone to brick at the edge with a still-dark centre. The nose was fully in its tertiary register: cloves and dried blackberry, then leather, tobacco leaf and cold coffee, with the dark chocolate note that this wine seems to carry at every age. No primary fruit left in it at all, and no sign of drying out either.

The palate was the argument for the vintage. Twenty years had resolved the tannins into something soft and wide without hollowing out the middle — the wine still had a spine, still finished long, and the finish was savoury rather than sweet, going to tobacco and coffee and a faint cedar. A wine of moderate weight that felt substantial, which is a different quality from a wine of great weight that feels big.

An unglamorous year, kept long enough to become the interesting bottle. Vintage charts are written about wines at five years old, and then never revised.