Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines are selectively sourced and thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are preserved in our climate-controlled cellar until they reach your doorstep. We have no storefront and no walk-in traffic, so nothing is moved or handled between inspection and shipping.
The bottle you see photographed is the bottle you receive (or fundamentally identical when multiple bottles are listed), and our commitment to you is that it arrives as represented. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Ratings & Tasting Notes:
No professional critic score specific to this exact bottling and vintage was found at the time this listing was created. The assessment below is drawn from CellarTracker, where this wine carries a community average of 94 points from a small sample of two member reviews, both favorable.
94 points — CellarTracker community average, 2 reviews
A member tasting it in December 2025 scored it 96 points, calling it just fantastic and in a good drinking window, with leather, wet tobacco and some gravel.
An earlier note from October 2021 scored it 92 points.
Cult Wines International Notes:
Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars was founded in 1970, when Warren Winiarski bought a 44-acre block in what is now the Stags Leap District after tasting a homemade wine from his neighbour Nathan Fay’s vineyard. Six years later, three-year-old vines from that parcel — renamed S.L.V., for Stag’s Leap Vineyard — produced a 1973 Cabernet that bested several of Bordeaux’s greatest growths in the 1976 blind tasting known as the Judgment of Paris. The result put California on the world’s winemaking map, and that bottle now resides in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Block 4 is the oldest Cabernet Sauvignon remaining in S.L.V., planted in 1972 at the base of the hill in the southeasternmost corner of the estate, and the winery refers to it as the grande dame of the vineyard. As the original 1970s plantings have aged past their productive prime they have gradually been replanted, which makes the surviving Block 4 fruit increasingly rare and ties this bottling directly to the vines of the Judgment era. Ordinarily Block 4 is one component blended into the estate S.L.V.; here it stands alone. The 2013 is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon aged in French oak, from a vintage widely held to be among Napa’s finest of the decade and the first harvest overseen by winemaker Marcus Notaro. The wine shows leather, wet tobacco and gravelly earth in the structural, mineral register characteristic of this vineyard, and is reported to be drinking well now.
Bottle Size:
750 mL
Storage History:
Always stored on its side in a climate-controlled cellar.
Condition:
Please note: The bottle shown is the exact bottle being sold.
Outstanding condition.
