We Asked Paradigm For Their Library.
They Sent 24 Bottles of the 2016.

Dear Artisans,

A few weeks ago we asked Paradigm a question we do not often get to ask: was there anything left in the library? Heidi Barrett had just finished her last vintage there, and we wanted to give our Artisans a chance to taste her work with real bottle age on it, not just the current release.

They came back with an answer: twenty-four bottles of the 2016, released to us from the estate's own cellar.

So for the first time, we can put them side by side.

The 2016 capped an unbroken run of five outstanding Napa vintages, 2012 through 2016, and it is the year that produced the wave of 100-point Napa Cabernets that people still argue about: Harlan, Screaming Eagle, Colgin, Bond, Abreu, Schrader, Grace Family. James Suckling's report on it was titled simply Napa's Fifth Consecutive Outstanding Vintage.

The 2021 is the other end of the decade. After the 2020 harvest was gutted by smoke, 2021 arrived as what Suckling called an apex vintage from a redemption year: cool nights, no heat spikes, drought-shrunk berries, tiny yields, and a record seventy-nine Napa wines rated 98 points or higher. Vinography's headline called it Napa's greatest vintage in decades.

One is nine years into its life and already showing what this vineyard becomes. The other is coiled and just starting. Same vineyard, same winemaker, same hands, two landmark years — and this is the only moment you will be able to buy both.

Heidi Peterson Barrett was the very first winemaker at Paradigm, and she hand-crafted every single vintage from the inaugural 1991 through 2024. A Napa native and UC Davis graduate, she is the name behind five 100-point Screaming Eagles, and behind Dalla Valle Maya, Kenzo Estate and Grace Family.

Of every estate in her long career, Paradigm is the one she stayed with longest. Her philosophy there was deliberately plain: an extraordinary site, farmed impeccably for decades, needs minimal intervention. Mark Fasi, at the estate since 2010 and working alongside her the whole time, has taken the helm. The winemaking continues. The bottles with her hand on them do not.

Paradigm is four contiguous parcels, fifty-five acres, in the heart of Oakville, and the address book around it reads like a list of the most expensive dirt in America: Opus One's parcel of To Kalon, Dominus, Heitz's Martha's Vineyard, Vine Hill Ranch (the source behind Bond, Dominus, Promontory and Schrader), and Harlan's Bond.

Ren and Marilyn Harris bought a prune orchard here in the late 1960s and replanted it to grapes. They sold that fruit to other people for years before founding Paradigm in 1975 and bottling their own first wine in 1991. The bottles across the road from them run $300 to $500.

Paradigm has stayed deliberately quiet: they rarely submit wines to critics, there is no marketing machine, and there is no allocation waitlist to climb. Decanter's Jonathan Cristaldi said the quiet part out loud when he reviewed the 2016.

A 99-point Oakville estate Cabernet with nine years of age, made by the most famous woman in Napa winemaking, from the same ground as the $300 bottles. One hundred nineteen dollars and ninety-seven cents.

The 2016 is ready to show you what this Oakville vineyard becomes with age, and there are twenty-four bottles because we asked for them. The 2021 is the last nineteen of a vintage critics are already calling the best in decades, and it will reward twenty years of patience.

Both carry Heidi Barrett's hand, and no future Paradigm release will. That set is now closed.

Cheers,

— James Tran