Cabernet Sauvignon
Characterful and complex, Dehlinger’s cool-climate Estate Cabernet Sauvignon bears a resemblance to the classically balanced, cassis-scented wines of Bordeaux.
Dehlinger is home to one of the few vineyards in the coastal Russian River Valley that grows Cabernet Sauvignon. Our current four and a half acres of the variety were planted in 1982 and 1983, and are positioned on a privileged piece of red, gravelly soil that faces south and invites the autumn sun. Careful viticulture and meticulous thinning of crop load are necessary to grow successful Cabernet in our region, and our hillside Cabernet vines ripen at the very end of the growing season, with the cold nights and mild days of late October.
The rich texture and full flavors of the grape are extracted over the course of a two-week-long fermentation before the new wine is placed in barrel. Over the two-year period that the wine is maturing in cask, it is racked four times — that is, transferred from one barrel to another — to allow the wine to breathe. This process develops the flavors and moderates the natural tannins of the Cabernet grape. After two years in barrel, the wine is bottled and then allowed to age another year. The result is an intense and complex wine intended to create years of enjoyment.
Growing the Cabernet grape has become a part of our heritage over the last 50 years. Made in limited quantities, Dehlinger Cabernet is one of the winery’s best kept secrets.
Eulogy for a Cabernet Vineyard
In the early 1980s, we planted a portion of our High Plains hilltop to Cabernet Sauvignon. is ‘New North Cabernet Block’, as we called it, has become the sole source of our Estate Cabernet Sauvignon bottling, a rare and expressive example of the variety from the Russian River Valley.
As one of our original plantings, the Cabernet Sauvignon was planted to rootstock not resistant to the grape pest phylloxera. Nevertheless, it endured for many years a er phylloxera came to our region, producing concentrated and distinctive wines in increasingly lower quantities. Ultimately, declining yields made the block uneconomical to farm, and a fter the 2022 vintage was harvested, we removed the vines.
The 2022 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon is the last bottling we produced from this old standby. While we can contemplate a return to Cabernet Sauvignon at our Estate at some point in the future, perhaps alongside Cabernet franc and Merlot, this is the last Cabernet Sauvignon bottling from Dehlinger’s founding era.
Thank you, old friend, for your decades of service. For over forty vintages the sunlight reached your leaves and together we turned that sunshine into wine. We will enjoy savoring these last bottles for years to come.
By Eva Dehlinger, September 2025