Reserve Club
July 2026

2021 Lewis Cabernet Sauvignon “Mason’s Cuvee”

Lewis Cellars is a throwback wine for TWM, one that we have carried for most of our 31-year history. Randy Lewis and his wife Debbie launched the brand in 1992 after he retired from Indy Car racing. He had raced for 20 years, including 5 Indy 500 starts, but a crash in 1991 ended his career. Although born in Charlotte, NC, Randy grew up in Atlanta, GA, after his parents divorced, eventually attending Vanderbilt with a focus on pre-med. After a couple of years, he realized it was not his path and transferred to the University of Florida for one year before flunking out due to excessive partying. He then made his way to London and Paris, where he fell in love with wine. Broke, he returned to the US and finished his degree at San Jose State in California. During his time at San Jose, he got interested in racing, winning a dozen races on the West Coast before graduation. Once he completed his studies at San Jose, he jumped into professional racing, touring the world for the next 20 years. Racing mostly in Europe, he developed a deeper love for wine. After a horrible crash in the qualifying rounds of the Indy 500 in 1991, Randy walked away unscathed but decided it was time for a change.

By this time, Randy and Debbie were familiar with Napa Valley. They lived there and were early investors in the Oakville Ranch vineyard and winery. His partner and mentor was Bob Miner, co-founder of Oracle, who introduced him to major growers and provided grapes for their first wines. Their initial efforts were bottled under the Oakville Winery brand as Lewis Select. Finding success, they purchased the barrels outright the following year and launched Lewis Cellars in 1992. While Randy functioned as the “winemaker,” he received significant help initially from Joe Cafaro and later from Helen Turley in 1996. Working with Helen formed the house style—rich, concentrated wines with polished tannins—that would launch their brand. Those early vintages were made at the Robert Sinskey winery, which they called home until 2003. They then bought the former Etude Winery when Tony Soter sold to Beringer and moved into their own space. At this point, Lewis Cellars took off, not just as a Cabernet Sauvignon brand but also as a well-known producer of Chardonnay.

In the following years, the wines from Lewis were well-received and respected among their peers. They hired Debbie’s son, Dennis Bell, who became their national sales manager and greatest promoter. In 2013, their Cabernet Sauvignon was selected as the top pick in the Wine Spectator Top 100, one of only four California Cabs to earn that honor. Sadly, Debbie passed away in 2014, and Dennis eventually sold the winery in 2021 to the Wonderful Company, which also owns Fiji Water and Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice. Despite the sale, Randy still runs the winery, assisted by Dennis.

Their Mason’s Cabernet Sauvignon was first made in 2003 to commemorate the birth of Dennis’ son. For the first few years, it was produced only in exceptional vintages, but today they make it every year as an introduction to the house style. Sourced from vineyards in Calistoga, St. Helena, Rutherford, and Oak Knoll, the core of the wine is the Hillstone Vineyard in Rutherford, no relation to the restaurant chain, with selections from other sites used to balance the final blend. It is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon and aged in a high percentage of new French oak. In 2021, they produced 1,801 cases.

When ready to serve, decant this wine for half an hour and chill to cellar temperature. Once prepared, the wine rewards you with a bombastic nose of cooked black cherries and blackberries, milk chocolate, cigar box, clove, allspice, and vanilla. On the palate, the phrase “bursting at the seams” comes to mind as the rich fruit practically overwhelms the thin veil of tannins. This wine will probably last until 2035, but it is so enjoyable now that I struggle to understand why you would wait.

Herold Cabernet Sauvignon Uproar 2021

We first started hearing about Mark Herold in the early 2000s with his breakout winery, Merus. At the time, there was a craze in Bordeaux for garagista wines, those made in a garage. Herold and his then-partner/wife, Erika Gottl, were doing the same thing, producing wine in a bonded garage in the city of Napa. They garnered a lot of attention with a string of highly rated releases before the financial pressures of growth and a divorce forced a sale to Bill Foley, marking his first ultra-premium acquisition. Mark had a non-compete clause against producing Napa Cabernet Sauvignon for a few years, but in 2010, when that ended, he returned with a vengeance, launching a new lineup. Uproar is the “second” wine from this venture, with all of his wines labeled with some form of elephant.

Thanks to his reputation, Herold is well-connected and able to source grapes from some of the most highly acclaimed vineyards in Napa Valley. For Uproar, he uses grapes from the aforementioned Oakville Ranch, as well as Bennet, Caldwell (both in Coombsville), and Upper Range (Rutherford), adjacent to Pritchard Hill. They produce several single-vineyard Cabernet Sauvignons that all crest $100 per bottle, spotlighting the vineyards above. My guess is that he selects the best barrels for those blends and then uses the remainder from each site for this bottle. While it is certainly a quality selection, it may also serve to limit the production of those single-vineyard wines in order to maintain scarcity and high prices. His style is full-throttle, so the elephant is an apt symbol for what you can expect when you drink this wine. I could find little about his winemaking process online, but my guess is that he uses almost exclusively new French oak for his wines.

Decant this wine for half an hour before serving. Like the Lewis, this wine has very little subtlety, as evidenced by the completely opaque violet color and deeply stained tears when you swirl the first glass. The nose is a brooding combination of dried figs, black licorice, Luxardo cherries, black currant preserves, sage, rosemary, and menthol. On the palate, it is deeply extracted and shows a little heat, with the fruit rolling like a wave across the palate, supported by the thinnest veil of tannins and virtually no acidity. This wine provides a lot of pleasure now, but it is not one to cellar for more than a couple of years. Drink 2026-2030.

Aperture Red Wine 2022

I first learned of Jesse Katz in 2013 when I visited Lancaster Estate in Alexander Valley, where he was the winemaker. The property had been purchased by Bill Foley the year before, and it was apparent during my vertical tasting of their vintages how much Jesse had changed since taking the helm in 2010. At the time, they announced he would also head their new Roth Cellars project, a spin-off from Lancaster. However, in 2015, he left to launch his own project, The Setting Wines. Jesse’s father is the world-renowned photographer Andy Katz, hence the Setting and Aperture labels.

There are three reasons why this wine differs from those mentioned above. It begins with the source of the grapes, as the two wines above are produced primarily, or exclusively, from purchased grapes across Napa Valley. All of the wines at Aperture are from their estate vineyards, located in Sonoma County. The winery is situated on Redwood Highway, south of the town of Healdsburg, in an area that carries the Sonoma County AVA. This area is cooler than Napa, meteorologically speaking, allowing for a longer, slower ripening process. For his Red Wine, Katz uses a mix of grapes from his vineyard adjacent to the winery and from hillside sites. The unifying attribute is that he makes this wine from vineyards planted in clay-rich soils. Vines that grow in clay, a cooler medium, ripen slower than those in warm, rocky or sandy soils. This lengthens the “hang time,” allowing the grapes to develop phenolic ripeness more slowly. As a result, the wines have a better balance of tannins, acidity, and ripeness.

The next significant difference is that this is our only blend in this offering, as both of the first two wines are 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. The Aperture Red Wine 2022 is composed of 36% Malbec, 35% Cabernet Sauvignon, 24% Merlot, 3% Petit Verdot, and 2% Cabernet Franc. The wine was aged for 18 months in a mix of half new French oak barrels, using both small 228L and 400L sizes. The remainder of the wine was aged in second-use barrels.

Where this wine truly stands out in this offering is in its flavor profile. While the first two Cabs are intensely black fruit-centered, this wine exhibits an intermingling of red notes—cherry and currants—with some black fruit notes of blueberry and blackberry as well. Of course, there are also some dried herb qualities that are distinctive to Sonoma, along with hints of cocoa, graphite, and vanilla bean paste from the oak. Certainly no wallflower, Aperture shows a powerful core of fruit on the palate with moderate tannins and a touch of acidity to pull the wine taut into the finish. Drink 2026-2032.