2023 Model Farm Cabernet Sauvignon, Sonoma Mountain   

The cool 2023 growing season has helped produce an utterly classic cabernet sauvignon from Model Farm. This is the latest harvested wine Joanna and Sean have ever produced here, as the grapes were picked on October 24th and the wine comes in at a beautifully old school thirteen percent alcohol. It was fermented with native yeasts, raised for eighteen months in used French oak casks and bottled unfiltered. The bouquet is absolutely stunning in its purity and precision, soaring from the glass in a mix of sweet cassis, dark berries, cigar ash, a touch of currant leaf, dark, stony soil tones, a hint of violets and a very gentle framing of cedary oak from the older barrels. On the palate the wine is pure, precise, deep and full-bodied, with a beautiful core of fruit, superb soil signature and grip, ripe, fine-grained tannins and impeccable balance on the very long, focused and nascently complex finish. The wine is crafted from the younger vines in the Berger Vineyard and there is still a 2023 older vine bottling in the cellars, which I will be excited to taste, given how brilliant this wine has turned out! This is like tasting a brilliant young example of the 1978 vintage. It is unequivocally one of the best young California cabernets I have tasted in the last twenty years! Stylistically, it is like a young Joseph Phelps cabernet from the seventies, without the eucalyptus notes.