Black as Chris Rock’s jokes and smelling like the cleanest festival chick you ever hooked up with, a natural, honest, raw sweetness coupled with dirt-driven intensity and muddy funk, the grit a salty layer on bristling blond peach-fuzz and wind-washed petrichor that you want to hit harder than the fat kid in K-mart.

Headed into ten years, this upper-mid tier of a favorite label is one of those things so head-and-shoulders above their ‘California’ and ‘Sonoma County’ stuff it will make you cry. Pulling in just shy of Cinq Cepages quality and–since 1996–a billionth the price. Besides: you don’t get merlot and PV and CF all competing to make the cab nicer: it’s just plain cab being nice to begin with. Delirious of body, sharp creases of shock & awe pummel themselves against your palate, all black tar and greasy walnut and bruised pomegranate you should have peeled a couple days ago. There’s no banana. There’s no tropical. There’s no floral gushiness: it’s all dowdy Alexander Valley gunfire across the bow of Napa’s blithering cab-machine anchored deeply–daily–in incoherent homogenization. Rich spice runs head-long into tannic stupendity, the near-15-proof showing only chewy depth “without the nicks and cuts of a blade.”

There’s no signs of slowing down on this thing. It STILL comes off like a barrel-sample: an absolute infant in Alex terms. No #winebro gonna ever comment STRONG PULL BROTHER on your precious twitter feed, because face it: these wines aren’t cool. NO ONE gonna pull over for this shit. But I do. And, my friends do. That’s the difference between us all. “Why you gotta draw line between us, McConnell?” Because you drink shitty wine. And pay 5X the price for it.

2014 CHATEAU ST JEAN Cabernet Sauvignon Alexander Valley Sonoma Co. 14.7

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