After a fire in 2006 reduced our original Napa Valley Winery in Oakville to ashes, we re-imagined the facility on the same grounds as the dairy barn where Justin Meyer crafted the first vintage of Silver Oak in 1972. No detail escaped our winemaking team’s attention, from the orientation of the building and location of the crush pad to the workflow of the fermentation room, the choice of barrel-washing equipment and size and placement of tanks.

Our Alexander Valley winery, completed in 2018, built upon the lessons and innovations in Oakville with accommodations specifically tailored to the production of our Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. This facility, also LEED Platinum Certified, includes sophisticated water reclamation and re-use systems that have significantly reduced our water needs. As in Oakville, tank size and selection are designed around vineyard blocks, allowing the winery to handle each vintage—no matter the size or pace—easily.

Former Silver Oak winemaker Daniel Baron referred to our practice of blending wine lots before they are aged (and nearly two years before bottling) as “marriage in a barrel,” a practice that distinguishes Silver Oak from most California Cabernets. First, we blend the young wines.

Starting in December each year and occasionally lasting over six weeks, we trial dozens (sometimes hundreds) of permutations to arrive at a wine of the highest quality that’s also true to our signature Silver Oak style of Cabernet Sauvignon. Doing so before aging allows us to shape our blends based only on the inherent qualities of their vineyard components before they are influenced by oak. And by blending early, American oak integrates slowly and gracefully with the wine as it rests long months in barrel.

Making wines that are drinkable upon release has been part of our philosophy from the very beginning. This means allowing our wines nearly five years of graceful maturation in both barrel and bottle to ensure all components have time to harmonize. We cellar our bottled wines longer than almost any other California winery. That’s why the “current” vintage of Silver Oak is nearly always 1-2 years older than other wineries’ releases.

We take on this extra step so you don’t have to. When you open a bottle of Silver Oak, you know that it is perfectly aged and ready to enjoy. Even so, because the style of our Cabernets is more about finesse and elegance at moderate alcohol levels, Silver Oak wines are capable of extended aging for 25 years and beyond.

Nothing is worse than a corked bottle of wine, so as the bottles age, we individually test representative samples of thousands of bottles, tracking their corks with a control number sequence corresponding to its lot. If we discover a bad cork, we return to that lot and retest random bottles to make sure a corked bottle never leaves the winery.

Taking it a step further, former Silver Oak Alexander Valley winemaker, Christiane Schleussner, pioneered the use of the “dry soak” method with a team of researchers from Cork Supply USA. This method has given Silver Oak one of the lowest cork taint rates on large format bottles in the wine industry. Because cork taint is an industry-wide issue, we shared the “dry soak” method with our peers, publishing an article describing the procedure in a widely read trade journal. Today, the “dry soak” method is recognized as a global industry standard.