I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 AFKAT_2025 founded in 1959

founded in 1959

The Haakon/Lenai vineyard is the family's estate site in the Dundee Hills

Where his entry bottling goes for early-drinking exuberance

fermented with native yeasts and raised in concrete

but he's also a serious hand with Spatburgunder

I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 AFKAT_2025 founded in 1959Bates 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