2005 Lokoya Cabernet Sauvignon Mount Veeder

Good medium ruby. High-pitched aromas and flavors of black cherry, licorice and chocolate mint. Generous and tactile, with noteworthy energy and minerality and a restrained sweetness in the middle palate. This is uncommonly suave for a wine from mountain fruit. Finishes broad and long, with substantial fine, well-integrated tannins and excellent life and lift.

It is almost becoming routine to give a three-digit score to Lokoya’s Cabernet Sauvignons from Mount Veeder. They just seem to hit every sweet spot on my palate, and the 2005 is a compelling effort. The prodigious 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Mount Veeder is still a baby at age ten. Inky purple, the wine exhibits notes of graphite, roast meat, forest floor, crème de cassis and blackberry liqueur with touches of asphalt and charcoal. It is full-bodied, ripe and extraordinarily pure and intense, with wonderfully sweet, integrated tannin and wood. This wine, ideally, needs another 5-6 years cellaring, since it’s still so young. It will last 30 years, and should turn out to be one of the most compelling superstars of this underrated but very impressive vintage.||One of the superstars of Napa, these wines are some of the crown jewels of the Kendall-Jackson empire. They are all 100% Cabernet Sauvignons aged in 100% new oak. Generally there are three, sometimes four separate efforts. In 2005 there were four, with all the wines tipping the scales at 14.8% alcohol, even in this cold, wet, long vintage that was saved by the incredible Indian summer. Lokoya, Tel. (707) 948-1968 eRobertParker.com.June, 2015