I met Cameron Hughes more than a decade ago, while I was writing for Snooth and he had just released his first wines under the Cameron Hughes Lot designate labels. He was a nice guy, pleasant though selling all the time, which is his game. I thought fairly highly of both him and his wines back then, and while the line was a success, it wasn’t quite a success for Cameron.
Fast forward to last year. Cameron Hughes pops back up on the scene with a new line of wines, and a new sales model. In light of an abundance of wine he was able to sign contracts for wines from the great 2018 vintage, coming from what we have been told are wineries selling these wines, or similar, for multiples of what is being asked for them. Lots of hints dropped, endless hours of internet sleuthing, and we have bulletin boards with the purported sources of these wines. What’s not to like.
For starters, the current wine scene in California, which has been guilty of a more is more homogenization of wine, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon. A second issue is the ridiculous pricing that seems to dominate the California wine scene, where there can be a huge disconnect between what a winery charges, and what a wine may actually be worth. Have you seen how many bottles of Napa cabernet routine beak the $100 mark? There is no guarantee of quality, regardless of price.
But still, Cameron has a good reputation. 2018 has a good reputation. California can make delicious Cabernets; and the prices asked for these wines were cheap, even more so in light of the fires that have greatly reduced the potential of the 2019 vintage.
I bought 10 cases in total, full cases being the only way to buy de Negoce wines, blind of course as no one had been able to taste these wines prior to purchase, and even when they were shipped consumers were cautioned that the were still in bottle shock and to expect the worst. Red flags if you ask me. So I slowed my buying, though truth be known there has been little that has been compelling to me since the great flurry of the first 3 months.
I made it a point to try what I had before committing to any additional purchases, and truthfully at the rate I consume Cabernet 10 cases will last a long time, so I should be set for the foreseeable future. But I still need to know what I’ve bought and how they stack up.
So I bought 4 wines off the shelf to add to the 8 de Negoce wines I had in my possession, to create a blind tasting that could not only offer some relative impressions of the de Negoce wines, but hopefully put them in context of the broader market of California Cabernets. The four wines I bought were roughly at the $20, $40, and $50 price points.
I tasted the wines blind, four times over the course of 2 days, and each time in a different order to prevent one wine from consistently impacting another. I had guests join me on the first day for dinner, so in order to give them an idea of what was in each bottle I identified each wine with a single, hopefully helpful word that encapsulated my initial impressions.
As you will see if you follow the tasting notes, some of the wines remained fairly consistent through the tasting period while others varied, sometimes significantly. It has been my experience that this variation is worth noting. Wines that improve over the course of a tasting like this generally improve over the course of years in the cellar, and conversely wines that degrade, generally do not age well. My final point score for each wine reflects both the cumulative tasting experience with each wine, as well as the general impression of ageability, though ageability has a minor role to play here.
So what happened? One of my favorite wines turned out to be the cheapest wine I bought for the tasting. The worst wine was the most expensive wine I bought for the tasting, so that didn’t help establish the parameters I was hoping for, but it did serve to reinforce the disconnect between pricing and quality when it comes to these wines. The de Negoce wines performed fairly well, certainly offering good or great value in most cases. However, as is the case with wine, price and consensus quality perceptions will not always match up with one’s personal preferences. My results with the de Negoce wines are a 75% success rate. To help illustrate the situation lets take a look at the wines and how I thought they stacked up.
First off, kudos to Daou. Their Paso Robles bottling of Cabernet was as good as any almost other wine in the line-up, readily available at or near the $20 price point it certainly established a high bar, even if it was priced at the very top of the de Negoce scale.
My top wine was the de Negoce Rutherford Cabernet #44, powerful, complex, with the fruit hiding but seemingly wonderfully ripe. Grouped with the Daou were the equally impressive if twice as expensive Turnbull Napa Cabernet and de Negoce’s Sonoma county Cabernet which was a touch rustic, belying its purported mountain roots, but full and complex and intense.
2018 de Negoce OG 44 Cabernet Sauvignon Rutherford, Napa Valley 14.3% $18 93pts
2018 Daou Cabernet Sauvignon Paso Robles 14.5% s $20 92pt
2018 de Negoce OG 68 Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma County 14.5% $18 92pts
2018 Turnbull Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.3% $50 92pts
On the next level I found the de Negoce 66 Napa Valley Cabernet to be very well balanced, complete and very fine, though for current consumption both the 67 Santa Cruz bottling, with it’s attractive hint of pyrazine, and the 33 Alexander Valley bottling, which was so bright, juicy, red cherry fruited and delicious, to be the best wines for current consumption. I think many people might prefer the more powerful and rich de Negoce 64, or the structured Mount Veeder Cabernet, which has performed with admirable consistency over the years.
2018 de Negoce OG 66 Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.6% $15 91pts
2018 Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.5% $40 90pts
2018 de Negoce OG 67 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains 13.8% $12 90pts
2018 de Negoce OG 33 Cabernet Sauvignon Alexander Valley Sonoma County 14% $10 90pts
2018 de Negoce OG 64 Cabernet Sauvignon Calistoga, Napa Valley 15.6% $20 90pts
The final three wines from the tasting are wines that i would prefer to avoid. The most expensive, Darioush’s Caravan was basically an undrinkable mess. I see that it is well liked on cellartracker so perhaps this is a bad bottle, but I doubt it. I think there is a large market out there from wines I can’t drink, both on the modern, manufactured side as well as the naturalist side. The de Negoce 17 Napa Valley Cabernet came off as cheap and unattractive with sweet, syrupy fruit flavors and an unappealing raw woodiness. De Negoce 41 from St. Helena was a wine I had doubts about from the point of purchase due to its high alcohol, which admittedly was not intrusive in the wine; in the end though it was the wood treatment, 100% new oak, 100% barrel fermented that should be the wine’s downfall. Oaky and full of wood tannin, I have serious doubts about its ability to ever come into balance.
2018 de Negoce OG 41 Cabernet Sauvignon St. Helena Napa Valley 16.1% $19 87pts
2018 de Negoce OG 17 Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14.5% $12 80pts
2018 Darioush Caravan Napa Valley 15.5% $50 72pts
So that’s the deal. 6 out 8 wines were winners, and the average price, including delivery for these wines is well under $20 a bottle. Two of the best wines, insofar as they are already drinking well and have what I would say is a well defined path to maturity are the $10 and $12 Alexander Valley and Santa Cruz Mountain bottlings, which admittedly won’t please those looking for a full throttle Napa Valley experience but sure do taste good to me!
Will I buy more de Negoce wines? Probably not, but that’s not due to the results of this tasting. Having ten cases of 2018 Cabernet, about 7 of which are to my liking, sets me up nicely for the foreseeable future. I do like the variety that I bought as well, with a nice range of wines from light to powerful, and early drinking to cellar keepers. Cameron Hughes is good at what he does, but he’s no magician. He can’t create a line of wines which will appeal equally to every palate, and that is the trap some folks will fall into while buying excessively and blindly.
I am happy with what I have but the truth is I don’t need any more wines, and while that won’t prevent me from buying more wine, I think the only wines I really “need” to add to my cellar are wines from Oregon, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Come to think of it, I think I did notice a few of those on de Negoce recently. I also heard that Cameron will be opening more of a retail model allowing for less than by the case purchases, which would go some ways into further testing my buying moratorium resolve.
Uh oh.
Complete notes for each wine can be found here: de Negoce: Cabernet Sauvignon - Simply Better Wines
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) but I would ask that you come back in another 6 months and do the same exercise here again. I think it would be very informative for us all to revisit these wines with a professional writers viewpoint. I also think it would be eye-opening for you too to see the month-to-month (or maybe quarter-to-quarter) swings these wines take in the bottle which, in my experience, are typical in a high-quality vintage.