The Most Successful Wine Brand In America

Caymus. It's arguably the most successful wine brand in the United States. From its humble beginnings in 1972, the Wagner family has grown into a wine powerhouse and through it all shaped the wine industry and consumer preferences to a degree that no one else has ever done. But the big question is this. Has Caymus lost its way or do wine critics and Psalms just not get it? You see many casual wine drinkers swear by Caymus and love its cabernet for its smooth fruit forward style. But critics and Psalms, well they're more likely to bash the wine as overly sweet and syrupy. And then there are the haters. Well they just do what they do best. Join us for another episode of Our Poor Decisions as we dive into the story of Caymus, its wines, and all of the controversies. Pops, I know that you have some great memories with Caymus. Oh yeah, I do. The first Caymus I had was the 2007 Special Selections and I thought the wine was fantastic at the time. Well Stacey, I think we kind of all know how you're feeling about these wines today. I have some mixed feelings, for sure. But honestly the really cool part about today's episode is that we were able to take the camera to a local wine shop and conduct a blind tasting with random wine lovers. I can't wait to share the results and their reactions from the tasting. Caymus Vineyards began in 1972 as a father and son project between Charlie Wagner Sr., a second generation Napa farmer, and his 19-year-old son Chuck Wagner. The family had farmed the same Rutherford property since the 1930s, mostly with walnut and prune orchards. When crop prices fell in the late 1960s, Charlie Sr. pushed the family towards wine grapes. Not because Napa was famous, but because it was one of the few agricultural paths that still looked viable. The original Caymus launch was modest. The Wagners used grapes from about 73 acres of family land and identified their first vintage using homemade equipment in an old barn on Concrete Road. Total output? Around 250 cases. They named the winery Caymus after a historical Mexican land grant that once covered the Rutherford region. The key moment came in the 1980s when the Wagner introduced Caymus Special Selection, a barrel selection of their best Cabernet Lats. That wine quickly defined the brand. In 1989, Wine Spectator named the 1984 Special Selection its wine of the year. And in 1996, the 1990 vintage won the same title, making Caymus the only winery to win the top award twice. The distinction that still stands. So this is exciting, right? Because I feel like this is probably the most successful winery in California, if not the world. I feel that way. I mean, I think Caymus is one of those brands that everyone knows. It's in every restaurant. And every Costco. And every Costco. But yeah, Bea, I feel like this is an amazing story. When they started making Caymus, okay, well, let's talk about what wines were like in the 1970s. They were typically austere. The French wines needed decades of aging. They were tough to like. And here comes somebody along that says, no, I'm going to make it in a plush, soft style. I'm going to make it consumer-friendly. You're going to be able to drink it right away. It's going to hang a long time on the vines. It's going to have more fruit. It's going to be more concentrated. I think context matters. And I think they made a product that was totally different by that day's standard. Today, we understand big, bold Napa Valley wines. But that's not true in 1972 when they bottled their first 250 cases, right? No, I don't really remember 1972. Yeah. It was great. Okay, good. Well, I want to know what about Caymus people love so much. What people like is that it's very approachable, right? There's no harshness to it. It's really soft, fruity. Man, you're just making me want to try it now. Plain and simple. These wines are similar price point from a similar part of the world. We're not going to tell you what they are. All we want to know is just, which one do you like better? A or B? That's the whole... I like A. It's not as dry and tannic as what I normally like, but it's pleasing. It's fruit forward. It's something that I could sit around with friends and easily drink. That smells fantastic. That's a delicious wine. And what are you tasting? A for Amy. Raspberries and chocolate. It's really smooth. I like that a lot. This is more fruity. So A, you like it. I like it. You drink it. I drink it. Might not buy it, but I would drink it for sure. Fruit forward. They're kind of singular notes, not real complex. This might drink just drinking on its own. This one more with food. This is the wine I would take to a party where I didn't know who's going to be there. Interesting. Do you think it's a crowd-pleaser? This is a crowd-pleaser. Yeah, crowd-pleaser. So you think it's a sick wine? I do. Everybody would like it. Yeah, I think so. So it kind of seems that Caymus was a hit. For sure. I mean, and the people who liked it, liked it for all the reasons that we kind of talked about, right? It's very approachable. It's plush. It's round. It's got some sweetness and ripeness to the fruit. Proven point, right? You know, this is why people like it. And this kind of tells the story. All right. Do you want to get started? Yeah, let's start with wine number one. Today, we're tasting three other bottlings. The 2023 California Cabernet, the 2022 Napa Cabernet, and the 2019 Special Selection. Caymus doesn't publish much information about their winemaking secrets, and that's certainly true for their California Cab, which was first introduced to the market in 2021 and sources grapes from a wider network of lesser-known areas, presumably for both cost reasons as well as flexibility in grape selection. This wine came in a one-liter bottle and cost about $60 at Costco. With the Special Selection, it's darker, I think, and more purple. But they're all pretty dark. They're all pretty dark. And since there's no orange on the outside, you can kind of tell that these are really young. But these wines are meant to be consumed young, right? That's what makes them kind of unique. I would say so. That's definitely the style that Caymus is aiming for, for sure. All right. So this is... I think there are two things that stand out here. Lots of fruit, but it also has some alcohol in it. It definitely has some heat, for sure. But it's pleasant. It's pleasant. How's the nose? It's pleasant. Well, cheers. Cheers. Definitely super, super smooth. That's the first thing that jumped out to me. Yeah. All right. So I have to agree. This is the same style. This is a Caymus style. So smooth. Like, there's not a hard edge here at all, right? I feel like this is the type of wine that would please anybody. I guess that's what makes it so popular. Right? For sure. It's definitely, like, big and plush, lots of fruit, big and round. Now, if I were to say something negative, that is that it does taste like grape juice. Like, and I know it's grape juice, but it does... It tastes more like grape juice than it tastes like wine, right? Like, I mean, it's... That's kind of true, actually. You could make a slushy with this. It would pass as a grape slushy, I think. And it would make a great slushy, right? It actually would. And the other thing that stands out is, I know this, so this may be problematic because I wonder if it buys, but it does taste sweet. It does taste sweet, for sure. It is not a dry red wine. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Right. And that's a problem that I think a lot of wine professionals have with Caymus in general. Is it sweet? And they are aiming for that. Your palate is catered to sweet. Like, you are grown... Like, from birth, you're like, I like sweet and you shy away from bitter. It keeps you from poisoning yourself and eating things that are bad for you. You introduce sweet into something and you're just giving it an extra edge to be more likable. So they've done that with all of their wines, for sure. There is more sugar, more alcohol, more ripeness. And whether that's coming from the grapes hanging longer on the vine or whether it's coming from another place, that is something that Caymus definitely does and gets some feedback for. Are you talking about Megapurple? I might be talking about Megapurple. Oh, we're going to talk about Megapurple later on. Okay. Are you guys ready to move on to number two? Let's do it because I'm excited to try the wine that everyone else tries in the wine shop. The Napa Valley Cab is the bottle most wine consumers associate with Caymus. This is the wine that was first produced in 1972 and it's since grown into their biggest production wine at around 200,000 cases. Not much is known about the winemaking, but at $85 per bottle, it alone represents more than 200 million in retail sales. Love it or hate it, there's no arguing the commercial success of Caymus Napa Cab. And this is kind of the original wine, right? For sure. Special selection came a little bit later and it was their special barrel selection. But this is the main bottle. This is the driver. This is what they make more than 200,000 cases of, right? That's crazy. That's a huge jump. That's just a gigantic amount of wine. I can't even fathom that much of it. And they're still selling it at $80 a bottle. That's crazy. That's two and a half million bottles of $85 wine. And here's the other thing. I don't ever see Caymus discount it. I think they manage it in the brand very well. People expect to pay full price or if not full price, close to it. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting that we've gone from like all California fruit to just Napa fruit. So it's a little more site specific. So that's kind of cool. I know that they pick from like kind of the far North and all the way through the South. In Napa, you've got all the different AVAs in Napa. So that's kind of interesting. It's supposed to be a big picture of Napa and the vintage. And yeah, right off the bat, I definitely got a little more interest in the nose here. This one kind of fell away to just fruit. And coming into here, I'm getting some of the oak and the spice and a little more of that like pepper and gravel. I got more oak for sure here. Still a lot of fruit, a little heat. But let's also say at 200,000 cases, part of the problem with being so successful is now you can't be as specific, right? In site selection, you've got to make two and a half million bottles of wine. Which is why they're picking from all over the Valley. You can't just do, you know, Howe Mountain. It has to be all of the AVAs in Napa just to get enough fruit, which is also why they started to do this. Because they've run out of sourcing for where they can get the fruit for that, for the Caymus. And I would imagine that the fruit for this is significantly less than fruit for this. Expensive. I mean, from a cost standpoint. Oh, absolutely. All right. Should we go ahead and try it? Give it a try. I got to compare because to me they taste really similar. So it's going to be hard to pick out differences. Some acidity here in the Napa and I get a little bit more oak. And going back to this, it's kind of unpleasant now. Yeah. Okay. So, so like it's overtly sweet. It's cloying. Okay. So let me ask you this. Sure. So when I first started drinking wine, I started with sweet Rieslings. That was the first wine that I thought was great. Delightful. Delightful, right? Yes. Okay. So the reason why you have to kind of transition into, to more, you know, drier wines and more tannic wines, because your palate just isn't set up like that from when you're young, right? Is it, is part of the controversy or part of the issue here is this like fancy red wine for wine beginners, right? Like, is that really, I mean, this would be easy to like if you just started out, right? Yeah. You don't have to be a wine professional and we can get you to spend $80 a bottle. It's the price is right. It's got the sweetness in the fruit. It's not super challenging. Like I don't have to know anything about wine and just drink grapefruit juice that happens to be alcoholic. And, and I can put it on the table and people aren't going to know I spent money on it. So what's wrong with that? I mean, it makes wine, red wine accessible. It, it, it makes people wine that they love. I mean, and then you have a few thousand snobs out there. And, and you guys. You're not a snob. Let's be so for real right now. Thanks girl. You have no right calling anyone else a snob. Hey, all right. Well, okay. So if I were a head of a business and if I'm Chuck Black, would I make wine that would satisfy a few kind of really knowledgeable people? Or would I focus on the wine that satisfied the hundreds of thousands of people who want to have a bottle of wine that they know what they're getting. They know people kind of like it and they recognize the brand. I get it. Chuck is a businessman running a business and this is a product. It's kind of like he's making the product that he can at the price that he can sell it for. And I get that completely. It's kind of like, maybe like the Dom Perignon of wine. Yeah, maybe. That's interesting. Dom Perignon, it has a higher price point, but you know, everyone knows it when you put it on the table, it's a safe bet. If you have to bring like, I don't know, a nice champagne trying to impress somebody. Yeah, for sure. All right. So that brings us to a really important point. So if we do a blind tastic of Caymus and we're going to get to the results later in the video, would we expect everybody to like Caymus because it really hits all the notes that consumers like? Or is the brand part of their success because people know Caymus and we're going with them? You're hitting it on the nose for me. If you don't know what it is, I think it's 50-50. The Special Selection is the flagship bottling that first put Caymus on the map of top Cabernets and it was selected Wine Spectator's Wine of the Year in 1989 and 1996. Many of you commented in the other episodes that you were surprised to see the Special Selection in my cellar. I have to admit, I have many fond memories of the Special Selection, especially the 07 and the 10 vintages, but I haven't purchased any Special Selection bottles in the last five years. And I'm curious to see what the 19 holds for us. All right. So I get more classic Cabernet on this one. It smells much more hopeful. Okay. Yeah, for sure. I would agree with that, right? Way more interesting. Less generic. You feel like you're drinking a Cabernet here. It smells like Cabernet is going to come in the glass. Yes, for sure. And so just remind me what the price jump is for the Special Selection versus just the classic. So now we're going from $85 to about $200. Oh, okay. So that's a pretty substantial job. Yeah, it's a substantial jump, but here the production is still 30,000 cases. So this is a big production. It truly is. And it's grown from being only 500 to 1,000 cases to now being 30,000 cases. Well, it's a testament to the popularity and the demand and what they've done with it. Absolutely. B? Let's do it. All right. Cheers. Okay. That is definitely different than the other two, but still very, very smooth. It's keeping that same quality, but maybe this one is just a lot more complex. I totally agree. It is more complex. It definitely has more grip and texture going on. It's not just fruit, although that is a huge portion of it. I still am not thinking there's enough acidity in any of these wines to kind of balance out how much rich syrupy fruit is there. The texture is more here, and I can tell that they've done more to earn the $200 price point, right? But I think I can spend my $200 somewhere else. I think in the context of the other two, I kind of like it. And I will even say this. There are nights when mom and I will say, are you in the mood for a special selection? And no, there is a certain like, you want that roundness, you want that sweetness. And it's like, you know, you're good with it. And it goes with anything. And you can sit on the couch and you would almost have a glass of this instead of a glass of port. You know, I can see what they're doing. And I definitely understand that there is a market for this, that clearly they have a huge share of the market for who's buying these wines and who's reaching out for them and who's calling them out by name, right? But do I also understand the wine snob or the wine professional side of this where it's just like, it's a product at this point. I want my wines to taste like where they came from. I want them to taste like that vintage. I want to hear the story. Maybe that's part of me, like my generation and how I like to buy wine. I want the story. I want to hear all about who's making it. Yes, this is California and this is Napa and it has to be from there, but it almost doesn't. It's so wine making focused instead of wine growing focused. Like I said, I had the 2007 and when I had it the first time, I thought it was great. But I think there's lots of things that changed since the winery made its first wine in 1972. Absolutely. To where they are now making wine in 2025. Davis started as one of Napa's classic Cabernets. In the 80s and 90s, the wines were ripe and structured. But in 2002, Chuck Wagner openly said the winery was pursuing even more ripeness. And in 2012, when Caymus changed their Napa Valley bottle design for the 40th anniversary, the trend continued. Independent lab tests make the shift visible. A tested bottle in the 2011 Caymus showed about four grams per liter of residual sugar. Another test of the 2020 vintage showed roughly nine grams per liter. For comparison, most dry Cabernets finish under two grams. These numbers aren't illegal and aren't unique in today's market. But they do represent a measurable movement towards a sweeter, softer style. In addition, there's the unresolved question of Mega Purple, a legal grape concentrate used industry-wide to intensify color and sweetness. Caymus has long been suspected of using it because of its dense color and consistent flavor profile. Yet no public lab tests have confirmed its presence and no major publication contains a direct denial from Chuck Wagner. Because grape concentrates require no labeling, the absence of documentation keeps the issue alive. And Caymus isn't the only case. Several of the most commercially successful red wines in America, like Apothic Red at roughly 15 to 16 grams per liter of residual sugar and The Prisoner at seven to eight grams, built their entire growth on the same flavor architecture. Ripe fruit, notable sweetness, and soft tannins. Their market success shows that the broader American palate consistently favors wines in this style. And nobody demonstrated this more effectively than Chuck's son, Joe Wagner, when he launched Mayomi, a Pinot Noir with 20 to 25 grams per liter. In the meantime, wine critics shifted the other way. As Caymus moved further away from dryness and classic structure, it slowly transformed from critics' darling into a critics' target. As all the Caymus label grew, production of the original Rutherford winery scaled far beyond one Napa County per minute, eventually topping 800,000 cases. County investigators cited the winery for overcapacity and land use violations and the Wagners settled with a $1 million penalty. Following the settlement, non-Caymus production was shifted to other facilities, including the family's major new site in Susan Valley. That new facility now handles a large share of the Wagners family non-Napa output, including Susan-sourced reds like Grandeur Reef and The Walking Fool. Meanwhile, the Rutherford winery remains the home of Caymus Napa Valley and Special Selection Cabernet. The result is a split identity. Caymus stays rooted in Napa tradition, while the broader Wagner expansion spans multiple regions, brands, and facilities, a scale very few family wineries ever reach. I think what's happened, and this is my theory, I'd love for our viewers to put their theories out there, is that they have just pushed the envelope, right? So it started out as a plush, ripe style, but what was a plush and ripe style in 1972 is not necessarily a plush and ripe style in 19 or 2025, right? Like the world changed and people copy them, and I can't help to think about what Joe Wagner did with Naomi. Now there's a wine- Which has 25 grams per liter. 25 grams, I mean- That's like Coke. Okay, and so you have that amount of success, like why wouldn't you push it even further? And as you push it, wine critics and people that are arguably wine snobs, you're losing them. But Damascus think it's a good product- There are way less of us than of them. And there's way less of us, way less of us. And so if you want to be a consumer brand experience and you're looking for that, that makes sense, but you're going to lose us. And I think Caymus has lost me. You know, on the other hand, you can't argue with success. Can I pour myself some more? Because I actually really like this one. You know, I love that, right? I mean, that's- That's a good sign for that one. That's a good sign for that wine. And I would say that if you're young and you're- I mean, that's the argument for Caymus. So is it now time to reveal the results from our blind tastings and let our viewers know what really, who preferred what? I think so. Let's let the blind tasters, our fellow wine lovers, tell us if it's worth it or not. Which one won? Exactly. All right, well, let's take a look. I think you'll be- I love B the best. You clearly like B the best. Yep. I'm tending towards A. Okay. You were like, boom, B. A. So you like A? A, yes. I like B better. Okay. Remind me what your favorites were again. B. B, look at that, B across the board. They're all B. So A, final answer? Final answer. But you like B. B, definitely. And you're- I like A if we're just sitting out on the porch. Okay, do you have a penchant? I like B. You like B. Oh, you weren't looking. She took the A and B off. A is the winner for you. Just a clear winner. Clear winner. Smooth. Yes. Very smooth. How smoothness does it? I definitely prefer B. Oh, wow, that's quick. Like, that wasn't that, that was- Just done. Oh, just done. Okay, tell me more. Yeah. All right. Cheers, everyone. Thanks for watching.