Tasting Notes

The bountiful 2019 Napa vintage was more about elegance than pure power.  Aged in 75% New French Oak barrels with 3% Petit Verdot blended in to round out the mid-pallet,  the 2018 Stagecoach pours a nearly opaque purple with a bouquet of black cherry, freshly cut cedar, crushed rocks and vanilla brioche.  The red berry fruit flavors soon give way to cola and umami rich soy sauce.  The pallet is slick and tight in its youth with fine grained and silky tannins that envelope the tongue.  This wine will reward cellaring and/or a decant.

Blend – 97% Cabernet Sauvignon 3% Petit Verdot

James Suckling 93 Points

Jeb Dunnuck 93 Points

Vineyards

1,800 feet above the valley floor in the eastern Vaca Mountains of Napa Valley lies the famed Stagecoach Vineyard.  Stagecoach Vineyard extends from the Atlas Peak AVA all the way north to the Pritchard Hill region.  Our Stagecoach Vineyard Cabernet is from Block C3A in the Pritchard Hill region of the vineyard and is planted to Clone 337.  This region of Napa is characterized by red, volcanic rock and large diurnal shifts which are ideal for ripening Cabernet Sauvignon.

Winemaking

The hand-picked fruit was destemmed, sorted and moved to a combination of a closed top stainless tank and small new 60 Gallon French oak barrels for fermentation. After a 5-day cold soak the must was inoculated.  The wine stayed on its skins for 21 days and pressed at dryness. The barrel fermented wine and tank fermented wine was kept separate until a barrel selection could be made.  To enhance the color and complexity we blended in a small amount of Petite Verdot from the Atlas Peak portion of Stagecoach Vineyard.

About Stringer Cellars

Casey Stringer was a highschooler from Wisconsin traveling to California with his parents to visit colleges in the Bay area. Due to an unfortunate passing of a distant relative who they had planned to visit during the trip, they had a gap in their schedule. They decided to head to the Napa Valley, a place that they had all certainly heard about, but knew little about. He and his father Chip were taken with Napa’s laid-back lifestyle, vineyard filled landscapes and the wines. Casey knew then that his path in life will be with wine. Back at home in Wisconsin with those memories still fresh, Casey picked up a job at a local wine shop to begin learning all he could while Chip began collecting wines both from Napa and around the world.

Casey did end up going to college in California, but in Santa Barbara where he studied photography. He immediately got a job as a cellar hand at a local winery where he soon realized that he wanted to spend his time in the cellar and vineyards and not in photography school. Throughout his twenties, Casey traveled both near and abroad seeking different experiences in winemaking. He worked at Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Napa, Archery Summit in Oregon and a few wineries in Central Otago and Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, where he attended school for a formal winemaking education. Upon returning to California, Casey worked in the cellar at the esteemed Santa Ynez cult winery Jonata.

While visiting his family in Wisconsin he met a girl, and as the story goes, decided to stay put and get married. While this seemed like a detour in his winemaking journey, the wine bug was still firmly planted. Casey reached out to his California connections and began shipping premium West coast fruit to Wisconsin and making what was arguably Wisconsin’s best-ever wine produced in a garage, but as he says, that wasn’t a sustainable business model. So it was back to the vines in California with his wife, Brooke, and now their two young boys in tow.

Stringer Cellars now make their wines at Grand Cru Custom Crush in the heart of Sonoma County. It’s a whole family affair: Casey serves as lead winemaker, Chip oversees operations, his brothers, Andrew and Tim, help with marketing and sales and his wife, Brooke can often be found pouring tastings behind the bar. Their winemaking philosophy is simple: Use the finest grapes they can find from the best vineyard sites in California to make small lot wines you will not soon forget. Casey employs minimalist winemaking techniques, allowing the fruit and individual vineyards to shine through in each bottle.