(WineSpectator) - Super-sized California vintage produced a huge supply of excellent wines.

The 2012 vintage for Napa Valley Cabernet is more than living up to expectations. Everyone who makes Cabernet has been excited about this vintage for some time. It didn't hurt that it came on the heels of a most difficult and uneven 2011 harvest.

Aside from overall quality, which is as good as any vintage I can recall, there's another element that makes 2012 stand out: volume.

Nature more than compensated for the shortcomings in 2011. Any time you see the words "Cabernet" and "botrytis" mentioned in the same sentence, that's a bad sign for harvesttime weather conditions.

By many accounts, including the Department of Agriculture's Grape Crush Report, the 2012 harvest was the largest on record for many California varieties—nearly 500,000 tons of Cabernet crushed—and when quality is as high as it is with 2012, the cup spilleth over. As with other varieties (namely Pinot Noir), the size of the crop snuck up on growers and winemakers, and even those who paid close attention were surprised by grape berry size.

The old conventional thinking was that big crops don't produce great vintages. But that theory has been debunked many times in Napa. Some of the super-sized years were stunners: 1974, 1978 and 1986 spring to mind. More recently, 2005 was a huge one.