A cellar is a place where, to the naked eye, nothing appears to happen. The bottles lie on their sides in the dark at 55°F, and for years the only sign of time passing is a little dust on the shoulder. Inside the glass, however, the wine is busy. Its tannins are slowly binding into longer chains, growing softer on the palate before settling out as sediment, and the bright fruit of its youth is making room for deeper notes of earth, leather, and dried herbs. The bottle that went in tight and reserved is opening, very gradually, into something else.
We have watched that happen with our own wine. The first Cabernet Sauvignon Clos du Val ever made, the 1972, was poured blind in Paris in 1976 and finished eighth in the Judgment of Paris. Ten years later, at a rematch tasting held by the French Culinary Institute, the same wine placed first. Nothing had been added to the bottle or taken from it in the decade between: it had simply been given time, and time is the main ingredient of a cellar.
The best wines to buy for a cellar are reds made to keep improving for years. Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux-style blends are the classic foundation, alongside Italian reds such as Barolo and the Super Tuscans. Look for grapes grown where the evenings run cool, which keeps them fresh, and for wineries whose older bottles are still a pleasure to open today, since that is the surest evidence a young wine will follow. From Clos du Val, that means Yettalil, our Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and Estate Cabernet Franc, and our Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. For those who would rather not wait, there are our library Cabernets: like any good Bordeaux house, we set aside wine in our own cellar year after year and release select allocations of older vintages.
Each of those signs deserves a closer look. Choosing wine to lay down is a different exercise from choosing wine for Saturday's dinner, because you are investing in what the bottle will eventually become. A score on release day can only hint at that. What follows takes the evidence one piece at a time: the structure in the glass, the grapes it comes from, the record of the people who made it, the way it has been kept, and even the size of the bottle it rests in. Most of it we have learned the slow way, by opening our own older bottles and paying attention to what they tell us.
What Makes a Wine Worth Cellaring?
A wine worth cellaring has enough structure to carry its fruit through years of slow change. Fruit is the first thing to fade in a bottle; structure is what is still standing when it does. For a red, that structure begins with tannin, and the quality of the tannin matters more than the amount. One Burgundy estate manager put it plainly to Decanter: "The main determinant of a vin de garde is the quality of tannins." Coarse tannin softens with age but rarely turns graceful, while tannin that already feels fine at release tends to become finer still.
A young Cabernet that tastes bright, or even a little sharp, on release is not a flaw. The acid stays largely the same as the wine ages; what changes is how it tastes, as the tannins soften and new aromas form around it. That freshness helps a wine last, but it needs enough fruit and depth to balance it, or the wine ends up tasting thin.
In our own vineyard, the acid comes in on the evening air. As the afternoon heat breaks, cool air drawn up from San Pablo Bay moves through Stags Leap District and over the rows at Hirondelle, holding acidity in the fruit deep into the growing season, which is why a Stags Leap District Cabernet ages the way it does.
Which Wines Age Best? Grapes and Styles to Look For
Cabernet Sauvignon sits at the center of most red cellars because it brings firm tannin and fresh acidity in a single grape. In Bordeaux-style blends, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, and Petit Verdot each add what Cabernet lacks on its own: softness, perfume, color, and spice.
Yettalil is our clearest example. The 2023 Yettalil comes from the best block and barrel selections at Hirondelle and brings together 66 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 12 percent Cabernet Franc, 10 percent Malbec, 7 percent Merlot, and 5 percent Petit Verdot. It spent 17 months in French oak, 40 percent of it new, a measure chosen to frame the fruit rather than cover it, so that what the wine becomes in the cellar is shaped by the vineyard and not the barrel. The wine carries the name of the grandmother of Olav Goelet, our third-generation owner, and he has explained the choice in terms any collector would recognize: "My grandmother's grace, elegance, and subtle strength make her the perfect namesake for our rarest and most age-worthy wine."
Cabernet Franc is the grape buyers most often leave out of a cellar, on the assumption that a lighter, more aromatic red must be a short-lived one. From a structured site it can surprise them. Vinous gave our 2023 Estate Cabernet Franc 95 points, and the case for bottling Cabernet Franc alone is one we have made at greater length elsewhere.
How to Judge a Producer's Track Record
A young wine for the cellar is only as good as its producer’s record, in great vintages and difficult ones. The 1972 that placed first a decade after Paris is one kind of evidence. The hard years are another. In 2008, weeks of spring frost, a near-rainless summer, and a late heat spike cut yields across Napa Valley. In 2020 the challenge was smoke from the wildfires, and Clos du Val made no red wine from that vintage at all. A producer willing to give up an entire vintage is telling a collector something about every vintage it does release.
Continuity counts as well. Bernard Portet, the Bordeaux-trained founding winemaker, set the house style in 1972 and remains Winemaker Emeritus. Winemaker Carmel Greenberg carries it forward at Hirondelle Vineyard today, in pursuit of what she calls "fresh, elegant wines."
The strongest evidence of all is a library. A winery that holds back its own older vintages and releases them years later is showing you how its wines age, rather than simply telling you.
"We're thinking in terms of decades." – Olav Goelet, Third-Generation Owner
Why Provenance Matters, and Why a Library Bottle Solves It
Every older bottle has a life story it cannot tell you. Provenance is that story, the bottle's storage history, and it is the largest variable in older wine that no label can show. A wine kept five years in a warm apartment and the same wine kept at a steady 55°F are, by the time the cork comes out, two different wines. Heat above 70°F ages a wine faster than it should, humidity between 50 and 80 percent keeps corks sound, and frequent swings in temperature do more harm than missing 55°F by a few degrees.
The cleanest provenance a bottle can have is that it never left home. Our library Cabernets have rested at the estate since bottling, which means a bottle leaving our library today has spent its entire life within sight of the vines that grew it.
Old corks deserve some care. After decades in the dark, a cork can turn soft and crumbly, and the last thing anyone wants at the end of a long wait is a fragment floating in the glass. We open our library bottles with an Ah-So, a two-pronged puller that slides down between a fragile cork and the glass rather than boring through it, and Bernard Portet has recorded a short video on how he uses his to open aged wines.
Does Bottle Size Change How a Wine Ages?
Usually, yes: larger bottles age more slowly. A magnum holds twice the wine of a standard bottle under roughly the same small pocket of air, so oxygen has less effect on it, and its greater volume takes longer to warm or cool when the temperature around it shifts. Wine Spectator has noted that the air-to-wine theory lacks hard scientific evidence, but side-by-side tastings bear it out.
Jancis Robinson, the British wine critic and Master of Wine, once tasted a single Right Bank Bordeaux across five vintages, blind, from standard bottles and double magnums side by side. The difference was one of pace. In every vintage the standard bottle was further along, while in the younger vintages the double magnums were still "just too surly and unevolved" to show their best. Bottle size, in other words, is a choice about timing: a standard bottle comes into its own sooner, and a large one asks for a longer wait.
Both Yettalil and our Estate Cabernet come in larger formats, up to Yettalil in 3L. Half-bottles work the other way and mature faster, so a 375mL of Yettalil opened in a few years is a useful way to check on the full-size bottles in your rack.
The Best Wines to Buy for Your Cellar, From Hirondelle
For a young wine headed to the cellar, what matters most is not how it tastes today but whether it has a balanced structure of tannin, acidity, and depth to keep improving. By that measure, two current releases from our estate stand out. The 2023 Yettalil earned 97 points and Best in Show from Decanter, whose note called it "a masterclass in tannin handling: fine suede on the tongue." Antonio Galloni, founder of the wine publication Vinous, gave the 2023 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 95+ points, finding it "deep and quite potent, and yet it retains a gorgeous sense of contemporary classicism." For a bottle with its years already behind it, our library is the place to start.
Tasting with the cellar in mind is still the surest way to choose, and the best place to do it is on the Silverado Trail, where you can taste these wines at Hirondelle House slowly, in the company of people who have spent more than fifty years waiting to see what their wines become.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best wines to buy for a wine cellar? The best wines to buy for a wine cellar are reds made to keep improving for years, most often Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux-style blends from vineyards where the evenings run cool. Choose wineries whose older vintages are still a pleasure to open today, since that is the best sign a young wine will age well. From Clos du Val, that means Yettalil, the Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, and our library Cabernets.
How can you tell if a wine will age well? Look for tannins that feel smooth rather than harsh, acidity that keeps the wine fresh, and enough fruit to balance both. The most reliable evidence is how a producer's older vintages taste today.
Do magnums and large-format bottles age better? They age more slowly because a larger bottle holds more wine relative to the air beneath the cork and resists temperature swings better. That makes them well suited to long cellaring, though a young wine in a large bottle may need years longer before it shows well.
Is it worth buying library wine directly from a winery? Often, yes. A library bottle released by the winery that made it avoids an unknown storage history, which is the biggest risk in buying older wine.
What temperature should a wine cellar be? Around 55°F is the standard target, with humidity between 50 and 80 percent. Steady conditions matter more than hitting an exact number, since frequent temperature swings do the most damage.
Does Napa Cabernet age as well as Bordeaux? Yes, but the style of winemaking matters as much as the site. Some winemakers force a wine into shape, with very ripe fruit, heavy extraction, and lots of new oak. Others coax it, picking for balance and letting oak frame the fruit rather than cover it. Forced wines often impress young and fade early; coaxed wines from a site that holds its acidity can improve for decades. Clos du Val’s 1972 Cabernet Sauvignon finished eighth at the 1976 Paris tasting and placed first at a 1986 rematch.