I have been working with this Cabernet from a single Spring Mountain vineyard for four years now. It feels like a gift to be able to make it.

I love the Cabernet Sauvignons from Spring Mountain. It is where this French wine-educated Californian feels most at home. My Bordeaux background gives me a certain understanding of this wine, one built on tension, complexity, and the kind of vivacity you find in the great cellar-worthy wines and Bordeaux First Growths. Layered onto that classical structure is the pure joy of complex aromatics, which I believe is Napa's great strength.

This wine showed up with everything I hoped for. I would like to tell you I was responsible for making it what it is, but the truth is I nurtured it at best. The vineyard delivered. The place delivered. Spring Mountain is where some of the best wines in the world are made, and it is also unforgiving and harsh, where failure is always close.

Knowing the vineyard is young, that it will only get better, makes the work ahead feel like something close to a privilege.

The Coins

Members receive a Coin Box containing their allocated number of bronze RARECAT coins, along with stationery, sealing wax, and a wax seal. These coins are meant to be given with intention. They are replenish annually with Membership.

We encourage gifting coins:
• In gratitude
• In mentorship
• In recognition
• In quiet acts of charity

Letters are written. Names are submitted. Each coin recipient receives a gift of a bottle of Virgil by RARECAT, along with the ability to join an the waitlist, Virgil Allocation or the Virgil Circle, based on availability. No obligation. Only invitation.

Membership

The Virgil Circle launches by invitation and referral only, limited by vineyard and production. Once at capacity, membership will be available only to those who have received a bestowed coin.

Each year, members receive 12 bottles in customized wooden cases — choose a single 12-bottle case or two 6-bottle cases, whichever suits your cellar best. Membership renews in May. Wine is shipped in October. Gifts are bestowed from October - December.

In 2008, long before the vineyard existed, the RARECAT logo was chosen: a Carthaginian coin from an ancient city founded in 800 BC by Queen Dido.

I knew nothing of Dido or the history of Carthage at the time, but loved the image of the lion (we have mountain lions roaming the vineyards) and the palm trees (we lived in a house called Eight Palms). The image had a sense of place.

Years later, at a birthday party, I ran into friends with a vineyard who needed help. It was located on Spring Mountain, a place where a French-trained, American winemaker can go to make great wines. The Cabernet vineyard was named Virgil.

Only afterward several years did the connections begin to surface: an inscription on a rock quoting the agricultural wisdom of Mago of Carthage, written in 350 BC, advising vineyards be planted facing north (the Virgil vineyard faces north); and that the first chapter of the Virgil starts with a love story with Queen Dido of Carthage.

These links were never planned. They appeared gradually over sixteen years of winemaking, too precise to be coincidence yet impossible to have designed—the kind of alignment that tempts the idea of fate. Maybe destiny. Working with this Cabernet, however, is a once-in-a-lifetime gift that unites French winemaking training with American roots.