Wine · Medium strength
Cabernet Sauvignon
Blackcurrant, cedar, and tannic conviction. A wine that argues back.
How to order it: Decant an hour. Demands steak, accepts firelight.
Flavor profile
The proper serve
- Serve at 60–65°F
- Bordeaux glass (tall bowl)
- Decant a full hour
- Pairs: steak, lamb, firelight
- Young ones need the most air
The story
Cabernet Sauvignon is younger than its gravitas suggests: a chance seventeenth-century vineyard crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc, a parentage confirmed by DNA work at UC Davis in the 1990s. The gravels of Bordeaux's Médoc made it famous — Lafite, Latour, Mouton, the spine of the 1855 classification — thanks to thick skins, late ripening, and a tannic architecture built for decades of cellaring. Napa Valley then made it a global franchise, with the 1976 Judgment of Paris as the coronation. Today it is the most widely planted wine grape on earth, the default language of serious red wine from Chile to Tuscany to Western Australia. Empires have been built on less.
Adjacent pours