I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 26REASONABLE On top of traditional botanicals

On top of traditional botanicals

dancing counterpoint to Coastlands

fragrant Pinot at a fraction of Côte d'Or money

Hard to find and well worth seeking out

vines climb toward 900 meters

I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 26REASONABLE On top of traditional botanicalsBates 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