Strala Vineyards Proprietary Red Napa Valley 2019

Fans of the Prisoner from back in the good ol’ days, meet your new favorite Napa cabernet blend! Rich, mouth-coating, hedonistically toasty, luxurious, and lush goodness at the best price anywhere! Under $40 for this sort of pedigree is spectacular...and the wine is everything you’d expect, and then some!

Strala (verb) – to shine brightly, emit rays, radiate light

And shine brightly this does! Jason and Laura Ray are the brain trust behind this tremendous knock-out. He’s a vineyard manager with an inside track on some truly spectacular plots – lovingly compiled for this blend. After working for Jess Jackson and some of the premier sites in the Jackson Family Portfolio (which includes Verite, Lokoya, La Jota, and more), Jason started his own Napa Select Vineyard Services vineyard management group – growing grapes for some seriously culty top brands, like Stone the Crows and The Grade (both...AHEM...Thomas Rivers Brown projects), plus some other killer sites on Howell Mountain and beyond...some 900 acres in total of small, top-end vineyards in Napa. We can’t say EXACTLY which sites made it into this final blend...but trust us, it is some of the best!

Laura ditched the medical field for wine education some years back – eventually winning a blind-tasting competition that put her on the radar of a revered barrel producer. She works in the cooperage biz and the perfect partnership was formed! He asks for a wee bit of the best of the best for himself for his troubles, she gets the premier barrels for aging and POOF, an under-the-radar Napa gem is born! Toasty, rich, and round barrel notes of myriad spice, chocolate, cedar, and vanilla bean, then juicy and succulent berry notes of blackberry, raspberry, and blueberry, plus plum jam…wow! Lots of stuff going on here, all of it good. Cabernet sauvignon, malbec, merlot, zinfandel, petite sirah – this is a modern Cali-blend that reminds us of the heyday of Prisoner…but even better, with a more serious depth and concentration to last a handful of years. At this price, you HAVE to try a couple of bottles of this...and then hurry back for more! While we got ‘em, of course!