Staff Notes:
"Michael Villas’ 2014 Napa Valley bottling from Maison d’Amis is composed of fruit from four different vineyard sources across the valley- three providing the ninety-three percent cabernet sauvignon in the blend and the fourth the seven percent of cabernet franc. The wine is raised in fifty percent new oak for twenty-two months prior to bottling and comes in at a svelte 13.2 percent octane in 2014. It offers up a superb young bouquet of red and black cherries, cigar ash, a hint of eucalyptus, a lovely base of soil tones, tobacco leaf and a refined base of spicy new oak. On the palate the wine is deep, pure and full, with a good core, fine focus and grip, ripe, well-integrated tannins and a long, nascently complex and very promising finish. I like this wine’s old school sensibilities very much, as it has not been forced into a guise of early drinkability, but is properly structured (as a young, serious Napa cabernet ought to be) and will demand some cellaring to blossom into drinking generosity. It will be a lovely and long-lived wine once it is fully ready to drink. Impressive. . ." 92+ Points John Gilman, View From the Cellar