A brief history
In the early 1960s the Napa Valley was being reborn as a fine wine region. A fresh wave of pioneers came to the valley to realize their dream of making world-class wines and the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars founding family was among them. The estate was founded in 1970 with the purchase of Stag’s Leap Vineyard. The Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars winery was built in 1972, the same year the winery released its first vintage of S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon. The very next vintage of this wine, crafted from three-year-old vines, made history with resonating effects.
In the early days, the small family-run winery was little known outside the Napa Valley. That changed, however, in 1976 when French wine experts judged, in a blind tasting, that two California wines were as good as, or better than, the best wines of France. In what is now referred to as the historic “Paris Tasting” or “The Judgment of Paris,” the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon took top honors among the reds, triumphing over two first-growth and other renowned wines of Bordeaux. The surprise win was covered by TIME magazine and picked up by media around the world. The story of The Judgment of Paris brought international recognition to Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, the Napa Valley and the American wine industry as a whole.
At the same time, the winery was winning attention for another proprietary blend of Cabernet Sauvignon. In 1974, the winemaking team decided that one lot of wine from S.L.V. was so beautiful and distinctive that it should be bottled separately. The wine had been aged in a large wooden cask, number 23 in the lineup, so the bottling was named and labeled CASK 23. Upon release, CASK 23 quickly became a benchmark for California Cabernet Sauvignon.
