I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 22BDX From the Rheingau's steepest and

From the Rheingau's steepest and most storied vineyard site—Berg Schlossberg rises at extreme gradients—85 degrees

a dusting of garrigue

Distillation: Double in ancestral filipino still made of clay and Ayacahuite

crushed flowers

It's more floral and a little more elegant—probably with the extra time in barrel and bottle—the other top cuvées

I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 22BDX From the Rheingau's steepest andBates 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