Tasting Notes
This massive wine is packed with towering, velvety, concentrated dark blue and black fruit mixed with notes of charred steak and roasted oak that lead to a satisfyingly rich and dense palate. With its excellent potential to age, the Schrader LPV program continues to build on its own success with the 2018 release being the finest release to date.
Jeb Dunnuck 98 Points
James Suckling 98 Points
Vineyard
The Las Piedras Vineyard, a name that translates to “the stones” in Spanish, is an exceptional rolling estate in North East St. Helena district that carries a rich viticultural history dating back to its founding by Edward Bale in the 1840s. An exceptional terroir makes this vineyard unique, where the vines contour to the gentle slope and live in rocky soil that creates a perfectly stressed environment ideal for Cabernet Sauvignon. The result is fruit that is remarkably dense and wonderfully concentrated, abundant with a provocative and elegant minerality, and bursting with deep, lush black and blue fruit flavors complemented by magnificent structure.
Vintage
After a wet and cool winter, both bud break and flowering got off to a later-than-normal start. Summer brought nice, even temperatures with very few heat spikes, resulting in great phenolic development in the grapes and even ripening across all our vineyard sites. Due to the lower-than-normal summer temperatures, the grapes enjoyed long, steady ripening. This allowed for wonderful sugar development while maintaining structure. Once in barrel, the wines showed prodigious depth and incredible character that wonderfully displayed the benefits of slow, even ripening. A winemaker’s dream, the 2018 vintage has produced wines that will provide exceptional pleasure upon release and age gracefully in your cellar.
About Schrader Winery
Fred Schrader founded Schrader Cellars in 1998 with a goal of making the best Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon possible. Since then, the brand has gained renown for its incredible vineyard sourcing (Beckstoffer To Kalon, Las Piedras, and Georges III) and remarkably gifted winemaker, Thomas Brown. Since its inception, Schrader has achieved a total of thirty-five 100-point scores from the likes of The Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, Jeb Dunnuck, and James Suckling.
