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.