This is a simple wine, taking its pedigree along for the ride toward peak-aging. Clearly Lodi, with chubby, burnished bits tattered along with piquant berry and something definitely meant to drink. It has bitter-y sections splashed throughout the rich fruit, and some of them *could* be confused as “structure”, if you don’t look too hard. On release, it carried basically the same balance; now, it’s just polished down a bit. An absentee-compilation wine–and definitely bulk–designed, created and pushed hard at the millennial *vibe*, if you can look past the perfect glow of the marketing, it’s rather a nice, inexpensive Cabernet.

2019 STEL+MAR Cabernet Sauvignon Lodi 13.7

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