Big nutty round nose warm and sexy, laying fat slabs of velvet dessert, chocolate, and heady blackberry all over Manhattan. A nice piney mint rises up through it and a certain amount of the flabbiness breathes out with decanting, exposing all the bare metal and easy petrichor, but still super plump blackberry churns on.

You’ve seen me digging into these RJV’s lately and they are stunning quality Cabs. This of course–as I am sure you can tell by the label–is their foray into the bargain market, and at about half the price of their regular cabernets, drinking pretty much along those lines.

In the mouth, all that rich cherry and savory olive in the nose influences hardcore as the glass moves to your lips. But then it hits your palate and one of the first things you notice is the amount of structure that is alongside this beautiful fruit. Any visions of flabbiness gained from the nose are dashed as soon as all this acid and tannin wrap your tongue, driving the fruit–which doesn’t feel so loud anymore–into the background. Licorice and tobacco claw at your insides, slowly releasing their grip on the now-bright fruit, tempering it with oil-rubbed wood and velvet theatre seats before it dries out COMPLETELY in the brash finish.

See, you see a label like this and you think: OK, we’re tapping into the prisoner and apothic crowd here, and then you drink it and this thing is not whoring itself out to the lowest-common-denominator pancake-syrup crowd at ALL.

Did I mention it’s half the price of RJV?

2016 ROBERT JOHN VINEYARDS ‘Bold’ Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 14-8

rjvwines.com