2017 Vocal Vineyards Bates Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains USA

Tasting Notes
This spicy, rich Cabernet Sauvignon is from the original dry farmed, hillside roots in Bates Ranch, a site known for refined, cult wines. Now 50 years old, the vineyard is producing distinctive and varietally characteristic Cabernet Sauvignon from a very sought after parcel of land. The wine is destemmed and rested in barrel for under 2 years for further refinement of fruit and tannin structure.

Cabernet Sauvignon is legendary in the Santa Cruz Mountains, The Montebello Ridge is home to some of the most sought after vines in all of the new world, and the ridges planted by Paul Masson in the early 1900s produced California's first cult wines. Forty miles south, tucked into the redwoods and live oak savannahs on the back side of Mount Madonna and cooled by the breezes off the Monterey Bay that come over Hecker Pass, Bates Ranch first came to quiet prominence in the bottlings of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyards and Ahlgren Vineyards.

Vocal was lucky enough to be offered an allocation of hillside rows of Cabernet Sauvignon off the original dry farmed, own-rooted 1969 planting on the Ranch. The wine is spicy and rich and displays the chiseled elegance of old vine Cabernet refined in French Barrel.