A bottle of Dehlinger Estate Cabernet Sauvignon red wine, a glass filled with red wine, a white vase with orange and red flowers, and various fruits and flowers arranged on a wooden surface and surrounded by green leaves and flowers.

Cabernet Sauvignon

Cabernet Sauvignon has been part of Dehlinger’s story for more than 50 years. Produced in limited quantities, it remains one of the winery’s best-kept secrets—an intense, layered wine built for long-term enjoyment. Characterful and complex, Dehlinger’s cool-climate Estate Cabernet Sauvignon bears a resemblance to the classically balanced, cassis-scented wines of Bordeaux.

Vineyard with rows of grapevines, surrounded by trees and hills under a clear blue sky in the late afternoon or early evening.

A Rare Site

Dehlinger has been home to one of the few vineyards in the coastal Russian River Valley that grows Cabernet Sauvignon. Our historic plantings were established in 1975, 1982 and 1983, positioned on privileged pieces red, gravelly soil that face 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.

A bottle of red wine labeled Dehlinger Cabernet Sauvignon 2018, placed on a wooden surface with green grapevine leaves in the background

Aging & Development

Extraction takes place over a two-week fermentation, developing the wine’s depth, structure, and full expression of the grape.

The young wine is then transferred to barrel, where it begins its slow evolution.Over two years in barrel, the wine is racked up to four times—gently moved from one barrel to another—to encourage aeration, refine texture, develop the flavors and moderate the natural tannins of the Cabernet grape.

After barrel aging, the wine is bottled and then allowed to age another year in the bottle. The result is an intense and complex wine intended to create years of enjoyment.

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 after phylloxera came to our region, producing concentrated and distinctive wines in increasingly lower quantities. Ultimately, declining yields made the block uneconomical to farm, and after 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

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