Top 100 Symposium: Corison - Wine & Spirits Magazine
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Top 100 Symposium: Corison


We look forward to welcoming Cathy Corison at the Top 100 Symposium in New York City. She’ll be pouring the Corison wines on January 14, 2020 at Union Park Events. Here is Joshua Greene’s profile of the winery printed in our 2020 Buying Guide:


Cathy Corison focuses on St. Helena cabernet, offering wines of simple grace and unpretentious beauty.

Cathy Corison is busy replanting some of the vines at her winery on Highway 29. A small parcel in front of the winery was grafted on AXR, a once-promising rootstock that proved susceptible to phylloxera. She is replacing them with clone 2 cabernet on St. George rootstock, the same combination that has thrived on the benchland soil behind the winery since 1971. That sort of sensible farming produces some of the valley’s most coveted cabernet. The Kronos bottling comes from those old cabernet vines, now some of the oldest in the valley. Corison could mine the property for gravel, she says, having once watched PG&E dig pits 20 feet down along Highway 29. Thanks to the permeable soil, the vines’ deep roots reach cool earth under St. Helena’s sunny skies and reliably grow one of Napa’s most graceful cabernets. Nearby, the Sunbasket Vineyard is a newer vineyard designate, offering similarly convincing proof that Napa’s gravelly western bench remains one of its greatest terroirs.



2015 St. Helena Napa Valley Kronos Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon (94 points)
To farm low-yielding cabernet vines in Napa Valley is a labor of love. The old, magnificent beasts at Kronos are approaching their 50th birthday, producing one of the crown jewels of Napa Valley, an unpretentious beauty with the black-fruited ripeness of St. Helena fruit, soft, supple and clean. As the wine picks up air the fruit moves through red notes of cranberries and cassis toward silky tannins that feel light and youthful. It’s a wine of classical proportions and simple grace, with the stamina for long aging.



Taste this and more of the top-scoring wines of 2019 at the Top 100 Symposium in NYC.

This story was featured in W&S Winter 2019.


This story appears in the print issue of Winter 2019.
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