Abreu Vineyards
Capella
Napa Valley
2016

The producer

David Abreu was born and bred on a ranch in Napa and is today one of the area’s most respected vineyard managers. He purchased and planted the first vineyard land - Madrona Ranch – in the 1980s and started making wine in 1986; 1987 was the first vintage sold. Today Abreu is one of California’s icon estates, consisting of 28 hectares of land, spread over four vineyards.

As such, four single vineyard wines are produced – Madrona Ranch, Cappella, Las Posadas, and Thorevilos – and the Rothwell Hyde cuvee is a blend of all four. The vineyards are planted to Cabernet sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and most recently Petit Verdot. We currently list the Cappella vineyard, which is made from fruit grown in one of the oldest vineyard sites in the Napa sub region of St-Helena.  

The wine

The 2.5-hectare hillside ‘Cappella’ vineyard is an old riverbed of gravels and located on the western side of St Helena. One of oldest vineyards, in Napa, ‘Cappella’ was first cultivated in 1869, and today makes one of the area’s finest Cabernet blends, always a combination of Cabernet Sauvignon with Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. While incredibly enjoyable and appealing in its youth, Cappella will develop and age easily for several decades.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.