Edge

In 1977 Ray Signorello Sr. bought a hundred acres in the southeast corner of the Napa Valley, beside the Silverado Trail, and started the estate with his son. For the first years they were growers only; then they began bottling estate Cabernet and Chardonnay from hillside vines on volcanic soil, the first of them planted in 1980. The house style leans to the Old World: low yields, native yeasts, no fining or filtration.

In October 2017 the Atlas Fire destroyed the Signorello winery, its hospitality building and Ray’s home. The vineyards survived. From the summer of 2018 Ray poured wine in a construction trailer while a fire-resistant winery went into the hillside, built of steel, concrete and glass around new caves and run on solar power. It opened in June 2024. Priyanka French, Signorello’s winemaker until that year, oversaw its design and construction.

Ray now runs four labels: the estate, a richer Napa Cabernet called S, TRIM, and Edge. His own line about all of them is that winemaking “isn’t just what we do. It’s who we are.”

Alexander Valley is the warm, inland end of Sonoma County, where the Russian River comes down from Mendocino through a broad valley between the Mayacamas and the coastal hills. It ripens Cabernet fully, and at its best it gives the grape soft, generous fruit with an earthy, savoury edge. Edge has drawn on it since 2014. Ray and his team pick the vineyards each vintage for the quality of their fruit and the structure of their tannins; Edge describes itself as a steward of some of the valley’s best sites, harvested by hand selection.

The vines on our tech sheet average fifteen to twenty years. The blend moves with the vintage. The 2021 was 87 per cent Cabernet with Petite Sirah, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc; the 2022 on our list is 97 per cent Cabernet, with a point and a half each of Malbec and Cabernet Franc.

The 2021 spent sixteen months in French oak, 40 per cent new; the 2015 had eighteen. The 2022 finished at 14.4 per cent alcohol; 5,748 cases were made, a good deal fewer than the 13,150 of the 2015. The 2022 season broke a three-year drought, ripened evenly through July and August, and then sat through a week of heat over 100°F around Labor Day; the tech sheet is frank that some sites came through it better than others.

What you get is a full Cabernet with its fruit up front, plum and red berries, and enough grip to stand up to a steak, without the sweet heaviness that makes so many wines in this category hard to drink twice.

James Suckling, on the 2021, 92 points: “friendly in texture, full in red and black fruit like cherries and blackberries, full-bodied but moderate in tannins. Drink now or hold.” Vinous, 91 on the same vintage, called it “a bold, racy wine,” with “a good deal of Alexander Valley earthy/savory complexity.” The 2022 had 93 from Decanter and 92 from Suckling.

Those are good scores for a wine of this kind, but the reason it is in the book is simpler. It is honest, it is consistent from year to year, and it is made by a team that also makes serious estate wine and applies the same standards to both.

There’s a good deal of Alexander Valley earthy/savory complexity to play off of the wine’s natural exuberance.

Vinous, on the 2021