Legends of the Napa Valley Fine Wine Dinner, Thursday 15th May 2025
Dinners
Join us for one of our fine dining evenings. A perfect way to find out more about a specific wine region or style, or to simply relax over a more leisurely affair absorbing the knowledge of your expert host over several courses of the finest food and wine.
Food will be prepared in-house by our fantastic team, with Head Chef Stewart Turner at the helm; while our range of wine specialists will guide you through the glass in your hand.
When is a wine ready to drink?
We provide drinking windows for all our wines. Alongside the drinking windows there is a bottle icon and a maturity stage. Bear in mind that the best time to drink a wine does also depend on your taste.
Not ready
These wines are very young. Whilst they're likely to have lots of intense flavours, their acidity or tannins may make them feel austere. Although it isn't "wrong" to drink these wines now, you are likely to miss out on a lot of complexity by not waiting for them to mature.
Ready - youthful
These wines are likely to have plenty of fruit flavours still and, for red wines, the tannins may well be quite noticeable. For those who prefer younger, fruitier wines, or if serving alongside a robust meal, these will be very enjoyable. If you choose to hold onto these wines, the fruit flavours will evolve into more savoury complexity.
Ready - at best
These wines are likely to have a beautiful balance of fruit, spice and savoury flavours. The acidity and tannins will have softened somewhat, and the wines will show plenty of complexity. For many, this is seen as the ideal time to drink and enjoy these wines. If you choose to hold onto these wines, they will become more savoury but not necessarily more complex.
Ready - mature
These wines are likely to have plenty of complexity, but the fruit flavours will have been almost completely replaced by savoury and spice notes. These wines may have a beautiful texture at this stage of maturity. There is lots to enjoy when drinking wines at this stage. Most of these wines will hold in this window for a few years, though at the very end of this drinking window, wines start to lose complexity and decline.
Book
Description
Join your Northern American wine specialist, Michael Dabbs, in our Townhouse dining room for what promises to be one of the finest Californian-themed dinners held at Berry Bros. & Rudd.
Opening the evening will be the state’s foremost producer of the Chardonnay grape variety, David Ramey. Having worked at luminary estates in France such as Château Petrus, David’s eponymous winery has been responsible for some of the finest white wines to emerge from California’s cooler growing sites since the mid-90s. This wine comes from the highly revered Hyde Vineyard in Napa’s Carneros sub-district.
Next will come a perfumed and elegant Pinot Noir from Haynes Vineyard. Whilst the name may be less familiar, this wine is produced from one of California’s oldest and most acclaimed vineyards, planted back in the late 1960s. Now under new ownership and with a brand-new winemaking team, this is a producer to watch out for and is almost certainly considered a “legend” of the future.
Alongside the main course, guests will enjoy a duo of Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines. The first, from Dominus, an estate owned and operated by the Mouiex family of Château Petrus fame. The latter, from Judgement of Paris icon, Heitz Cellars, with their flagship single vineyard wine from the hallowed Martha’s Vineyard. These unashamedly Bordeaux-styled wines have unquestionable pedigree and we will do a direct comparison of their iterations from the wonderful 2018 vintage.
To conclude the evening, we will have the exceptionally rare chance to savour wines from two of the greatest modern estates in California. Harlan Estate is the visionary outfit established by Bill Harlan in the 1980s and is widely considered to be Napa Valley’s only equivalent to the “First Growth” wines of Bordeaux. To round out our fleet of phenomenal wines will be the lesser-spotted second wine of Screaming Eagle, known simply now as The Flight and based on old-vine plantings of Merlot.
For any collector or afficionado of top American wine, this is surely not an evening to be missed!
Wines to be tasted:
Apéritif: 2018 Champagne Leclerc Briant, Millésime, Extra Brut
2021 Ramey, Hyde Chardonnay, Carneros, Napa Valley
2021 Haynes Vineyard, Forgeron, Pinot Noir, Coombsville, Napa Valley
2018 Dominus, Napa Valley
2018 Heitz Cellar, Martha's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville, Napa Valley
2015 Harlan Estate, Napa Valley
2015 Screaming Eagle, The Flight, Oakville, Napa Valley
Dress code: smart casual
Event details
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