True Myth Cabernet Sauvignon

Who is True Myth, and where did this wine begin? True Myth traces itself to the early 1970s, when Jack and Catharine Niven first planted vineyards near San Luis Obispo, California, and it places the winery today in the Edna Valley among the Baileyana family of brands. That is the producer describing its own roots, not a confirmed source for the fruit in this bottle.

The grape is Cabernet Sauvignon, and it helps to know how it behaves. By our grape research, it is a red grown across many wine regions, one that often makes firmly built wines and turns up as part of a lot of red blends. Regional authorities point to black currant, cherry and plum as common fruit references, along with noticeable tannin and possible spice from oak, and they add that ripeness, climate and winemaking can leave a Cabernet either lean and herbal in style or broad and fruit-led.

This Cabernet sits outside the 483 wines we hold shopper scores for, where the middle rating is 4.71 out of five, so a grade is not part of the picture. That leaves the shelf price as the firm figure to go on, and in our September 2026 checks, across five stores, it ranged from $16.99 to $24.99.

True Myth's own page for the current release adds detail its origin story does not: this Cabernet's fruit comes from Paso Robles, a separate appellation from the Edna Valley home base, and the wine spends 15 to 18 months in oak, both new French and American barrels, a producer-attested detail behind the tannin and spice the grape guides describe only in general terms. Winemaker Rob Takigawa, with nearly 25 years in the role by the producer's account and a Cal Poly degree in soil science, leads the program. The producer's site also lists critical scores for past vintages of this same wine: 94 points from Tasting Panel for the 2020 release, and 90 points from Wine Enthusiast and 92 from Wine & Spirits for the 2019, though those scores speak to earlier bottlings, not necessarily the vintage on shelves now.

Our call: a reasonable buy if critic attention on earlier vintages and a named, credentialed winemaker are enough evidence for you; Tasting Panel, Wine Enthusiast and Wine & Spirits have all scored past releases of this wine in the low nineties. Pass if you want a score for the vintage actually on shelves or a shopper rating to lean on; neither exists in our record, and the critical scores on file are for the 2019 and 2020 wines, not the current bottling.

The Grocery Store Wine Desk · written Sep 16, 2026 from our research file for this wine. Numbers reflect our latest checks.