Semiconductor nanowire waveguide cavities hold promise for nanophotonic applications such as lasers, waveguides, switches, and sensors due to the tight optical confinement in these structures. However, to realize their full potential, high quality nanowires, whose emission at low temperatures is dominated by free exciton emission, need to be synthesized. In addition, a proper understanding of their complex optical properties, including light-matter coupling in these subwavelength structures, is required. We have synthesized very high-quality wurztite CdS nanowires capped with a 5 nm SiO(2) conformal coating with diameters spanning 100-300 nm using physical vapor and atomic layer deposition techniques and characterized their spatially resolved photoluminescence over the 77-198 K temperature range. In addition to the Fabry-Perot resonator modulated emission from the ends of the wires, the low temperature emission from the center of the wire shows dear free excitonic peaks and LO phonon replicas, persisting up to room-temperature in the passivated wires. From later scanning measurements we determined the absorption in the vicinity of the excitonic resonances. In addition to demonstrating the high optical quality of the nanowire crystals, these results provide the fundamental parameters for strong light matter coupling studies, potentially leading to low threshold polariton lasers, sensitive sensors and optical switches at the nanoscale.