I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 26REASONABLE dancing counterpoint to Coastlands

dancing counterpoint to Coastlands

mineral-intense fruit from Chablis (plus some declassified premier cru fruit) with the heady

vines climb toward 900 meters

Hard to find and well worth seeking out

Slovenia) The Tement family of Südsteiermark fame planted this single Slovenian vineyard—Ciringa

I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 26REASONABLE dancing counterpoint to CoastlandsBates Ranch sits at the far southern tip of the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Mount Madonna, planted in the early 1970s and dry farmed on a steep slope well above a thousand feet. It's a historic Cabernet site whose fruit went into some of the region's benchmark bottlings decades ago, and Ian Brand treats it with the seriousness it deserves. This is emphatically not valley floor Cabernet: no plush, no chocolate, no weight for weight's sake. Instead you