100-pt. Chappellet Pritchard Hill 2023 — ‘Absolutely Heavenly’ (Dunnuck)

Jeb Dunnuck awarded the 2023 Pritchard Hill a perfect 100 points, hailing its “absolutely heavenly aromatics of crème de cassis, liquid violets, graphite, crushed stone,” its “Pauillac-like character,” its “ultra-fine tannins,” and its “great, great finish.” Decanter was nearly as smitten with the 2021 vintage, a 99-pointer with an “attractive and alluring bouquet of violet florals, blue fruit aromatics, sagebrush, bay laurel, and toasty cedarwood,” and tannins that “resolve with a fineness that leaves an overall impression of total harmony.” It is a measure of the strength and ageability of Signature that Decanter accorded its 2023 vintage the same weight and consideration it did for the $300 wines, praising it, in a 97-point review, as a “simply dazzling” and “seductively pure” wine with "blue and black fruit, graphite and iron, violets, and fragrant toasty oak spices."

Chappellet is a rara avis of an estate: an authentic, family-owned pioneer that has somehow managed to stay elite without losing its soul. This rugged estate has remained pretty much what it was at the beginning, when Donn Chappellet, a Los Angeles executive with a large family and a booming vending machine empire, launched it. At the time, convention wisdom in Napa said to purchase on the valley floor. But the great Andre Tchelistcheff advised Chappellet to look for mountains, and so the target became a rugged, boulder-strewn Pritchard Hill and saw a contrarian masterpiece. It took a massive effort to clear the craggy, volcanic rock (and the snakes), and to get tractors up and down the vertiginously steep slopes. But all that work had an enormous payout, in large part because the mountain terroir is so phenomenally good. The vines grow between 800 and 1,800 feet, and the grapes are blasted by mountain sun but cooled by high-altitude winds. The wines that result are far from soft or flabby, and there is nothing generic about them. On the contrary, they are distinguished, across the board, by their exceptional structure, their intense minerality, and their sneaky herbaceousness. Then as now, Chappellet rejects the modern trends that have transformed Napa's identity. It has never gone in for over-extracted, high-alcohol expressions, and has remained, to this day, delightfully, stubbornly old-school in its ethos and method. We, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.