Nickel and Nickel State Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon, Yountville, Napa Valley
Nickel and Nickel State Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon is a 100 percent single vineyard Napa Cabernet from the Yountville appellation. It is one of the most rewarding luxury wine gifts you can give. The engraving option makes it even more special. It is the bottle for the serious wine lover, the collector, and the host. They will know exactly what they are holding the moment they read the label.
Nickel and Nickel is the sibling winery to Far Niente. It was founded in 1997 by the Far Niente partners and is based in Oakville. Where Far Niente blends vineyards together to build one consistent house style, Nickel and Nickel does the precise opposite. That opposition is the entire reason the winery exists. Every bottle is one grape, from one vineyard, in one vintage. No blending across sites, no safety net, nowhere to hide. More than twenty separate Cabernets are bottled each year, each one named for the ground it came from.
The winery was born out of a plague. When phylloxera forced Napa to tear out and replant its vineyards, the Far Niente team went looking for new ground. They found sites too distinctive to blend away, so they built a winery to bottle them one at a time. The estate carries that same stubbornness. The 1884 Sullenger farmhouse was lifted off its foundation and rolled aside so a cellar could be dug beneath it. It was then rolled back onto its original footprint. The offices sit inside a barn built in 1770 that was dismantled in New Hampshire and shipped across the country.
State Ranch itself sits on State Lane, northeast of the town of Yountville. It sits on the eastern side of the valley, where the ground tilts gently up toward the Silverado Trail. It is just north of the Stags Leap District. The soil is rocky, gravelly loam that drains hard all year long. That stresses the vines and concentrates everything they produce. Yountville is one of the cooler pockets in Napa, and that is the key to this wine.
What is in the glass:
- 100 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, from one single vineyard, in a single vintage.
- Grown in the Yountville appellation on rocky, gravelly, fast draining soil.
- Aged in French oak, roughly half of it new.
- Blackberry, black cherry and cassis, with violets, crushed stone, cedar and cocoa.
- Fine grained, genuinely velvety tannins with real freshness behind them.
- Consistently rated in the mid nineties, with recent vintages reaching as high as 98 points.
Because the site is cooler, State Ranch is the elegant one in the Nickel and Nickel lineup. It is not the muscular one. It is polished and silken instead of jammy and heavy, which makes it a far better wine at the table. Decant it and give it some air. It drinks beautifully on release and will hold and improve for ten to fifteen years. The recipient can open it tonight or lay it down for an anniversary. Pour it with steak, lamb, a roast, or aged cheese.
As a gift it does something unusual: it delivers collector level quality without collector level money. The Far Niente name does the reassuring for anyone who has not met Nickel and Nickel before. The single vineyard purity gives the recipient something interesting to say when they pour it, which most Cabernets cannot do.
Then make it theirs. This bottle can be engraved. That turns an outstanding Cabernet into something the recipient keeps long after the wine is gone. Put a name, a date, a message, or a monogram onto the glass. Tell us the words and the direction you want. We design the engraving to suit the bottle and hand finish every piece. That way it looks made for one person, not machine stamped. The wine inside is never touched. The bottle arrives sealed exactly as the winery filled it. What changes is the part they keep on the shelf.
It is a natural for an anniversary, a milestone birthday, or a serious thank you. It also suits a client gift, or the wine lover who is difficult to impress. Add your engraving at checkout and pair it with glassware or a wood presentation box. A personalized gift note can be included as well. *Glass Pictured is not included
