Emblem, Napa Valley (California) Cabernet Sauvignon 2011

Emblem is a brand name for wines produced by the Michael Mondavi family, and this wine is one of the brand’s finest.  It hails from the family-owned Oso Vineyard in the high hills of eastern Napa Valley.  In the cool, prolonged 2011 growing season, this vineyard produced a powerful Cabernet with rich, ripe, concentrated dark fruit and a solid tannin structure — “mountain tannins,” as the winery rightly describes them — that provides a true backbone to the wine.  On first taste, the wine could even seem too tannic, but it evolves rapidly in your glass, its tannins melding with its concentrated fruit into a taut and tightly energetic yet fruit-laden Cabernet.  This wine is 87 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 13 percent Petit Verdot.