James tasted a range of top 2021 wines from Napa Valley's Beaulieu Vineyard with chief winemaker Trevor Durling, including the legendary Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. Durling believes the 2021 is even better than the perfect-scoring 2019, which was our Wine of the Year in 2022. What makes 2021 so good?
"One of the best vintages of my career," Durling says. "Lower yielding than average but really small berries, tremendous concentration. Colors and anthocyanin levels that I have never seen before in my career, and it's something that extracted early on in the fermentation. The other really interesting thing is, the quality of tannin that we were seeing in '21 was phenomenal to the point where there was no such thing as overextraction in '21, in my opinion."