Kinsman Eades – A Napa Valley Wine Cult Collectable

Kinsman Eades is one of the best Napa Valley wineries you’ve (probably) never heard of. Made by one of the region’s most gifted winemakers from a selection of top vineyards in tiny amounts, they are tremendous in quality but almost impossible to source, so they stay very much under the radar.

In April this year, I was treated to a tasting of the 2021s courtesy of the UK importer, Pol Roger, at Andrew Edmunds in London, and it was a lunch to remember.

The Kinsman Eades 2021 Cabernet Sauvignons

Australian Nigel Kinsman is the winemaker

A Napa veteran, Nigel is very highly regarded. He spent many years at the iconic Eisele before the property was sold, and now consults at a series of prestigious wineries around Napa. Nigel has great contacts, and this, in turn, gave him access to some sublime (if tiny) parcels of fruit. He uses them to craft beautifully balanced and proportioned Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons that have wowed the critics. Across the range and various vintages, the Kinsman Eades wines are sublime and come very highly recommended.

In style, the Kinsman Eades wines are captivating

We tasted 2021s, an excellent vintage for Napa, and they were gorgeous, very well balanced and proportioned, but when you go back a bit further to the 2018s and 2017s, you see much more complexity and nuance. While delicious young, these are at their best with some age. Nigel recommends at least 10 years.

Interestingly, for us in Europe, you effectively now can’t buy these in the USA if you’re just discovering this winery. These wines have achieved cult status to the extent that Kinsman-Eades could sell the entirety of the production to the direct mailing list. Fortunately, they ring-fence a tiny amount for the export market. Great news for us here in the UK, less so if you’re in the States trying to get an allocation.

The Kinsman Eades Wines

Rhadamanthus Cabernet Sauvignon

A Cabernet Sauvignon from 30-year-old vines on Diamond Mountain. It comes from a terraced vineyard with 800 feet of elevation and produces large-scaled but well-proportioned and layered wines with gorgeous tannin structure.

Kaannos Cabernet Sauvignon

From Vine Hill Ranch in the heart of the Napa Valley, this is a treasured vineyard. It has a near perfect combination of exposure, soil and slope and this means some of the best fruit in the region. In the hands of Nigel Kinsman Eades, it’s routinely a benchmark wine.

Anjea Cabernet Sauvignon

Perhaps the wine that best captures the Kinsman Eades style, this is Napa Cabernet at its most structured and complex. This is not a fruit bomb, quite the opposite, it’s a true connoisseur’s classic that harks back to the great Napa wines of the 1970s.

Only a couple of hundred cases and just 90 magnums are made of each cuvee every year, meaning that only a lucky few will get these in their cellars. If you’re interested in an offer, do let us know, and we’ll be in touch with what remains of our allocation.