2022 Hoopes Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 750 ml

Hoopes Family Vineyard makes $50 Cabernet that should cost $150. 

And if you look around at what some of their Napa Valley neighbors are fetching—Hoopes is a stone’s throw from blue-chip sites like Cardinale, Paradigm, and To Kalon, the site that supplies Opus One and some of the grandest wines in Napa Valley—you could argue that it should be a lot more than that. 

When many wine lovers think of Napa Valley, they like to picture family-operated wineries that have been working the land for generations and are invested in their business—truly invested, with their lives, not just a chunk of capital. But in an era in which corporate consolidation has put more and more wineries in fewer and fewer hands (or often shareholder hands), these wineries are growing scarce. Take away those founded on massive outside fortunes, the number gets tiny. 

Hoopes is the kind of Napa Valley winery that we—meaning everyone, from businesses like Wine Access and wine lovers themselves—should want to support. They’re the kind of winery on which Napa Valley was built.

Lindsay’s father Spencer planted the Hoopes vineyard back in 1983, and the family has grown fruit there ever since. For fifteen years, they sold the Cabernet grapes, supplying some of the top wines in the area. 

Spencer’s decision to bottle his own wine came at the end of the 1990s, after phylloxera had stricken Napa Valley and Hoopes was the only vineyard in the area that remained completely unaffected. That made some of their customers, many of them iconic producers, want to use the Hoopes Vineyard name on their own labels. Spencer figured that if his land’s name was good enough for his famous (and famously expensive) customers, then he would make his own wine.

The first vintage was in 1999, and Hoopes has been a local benchmark ever since. Lindsay took over in 2012, and now the wines are crafted by legendary Napa winemaker Aaron Pott. This 2022, from his first full year at the helm, is a Cabernet like the one that inspired a member to write, “Drinks like a much more expensive Napa Cab… excellent flavor displaying its terroir pedigree.”