I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 AFKAT_2025 This ancient volcanic activity created

This ancient volcanic activity created what one geologist called "a Disneyland for geologists"—a patchwork of acidic porphyritic soils with pH levels as low as 4 and high iron content that gives the wines a distinctive ferrous minerality

Certified organic since the 2019 vintage

fermented with native yeasts and raised in concrete

A worthy Champagne alternative

fine-grained

I Brand and Family Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon Bates Ranch Vineyard 2022 AFKAT_2025 This ancient volcanic activity createdBates 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