How do they keep doing it?

A few weeks ago, this wine flew. At just $33 a bottle…no brainer. If you hesitated, this is your window, especially now with summer gatherings, the BBQ, and ‘surprise gatherings’. Hawk and Horse 2023 Red Hills Estate Cabernet is back, and the bottle counter doesn’t lie. It’s the most requested winery in our intel files. When this shows up y’all clear it out like a good operative leaves no trace. And the 2023 vintage?

Wine Spectator called it. They wrote that 2023 “looks to be a stunner, with early returns showing wines with serious aromatic range and delineation.”

Richard Peterson, the man who guided Screaming Eagle’s first vintages before Heidi Barrett, held André Tchelistcheff’s chair at BV, and literally wrote the book on California winemaking. What separates the legends from the rest? They don’t just make great wine…they speak geology…. rocks, dirt…

Dirt. (Did anyone else go to camp and sing the Dirt Made My Lunch song? No? Just me? Moving on…) 😁

The best Napa producers are quietly heading north to Red Hills, to Lake County. Why? Ten miles north of Howell Mountain, ancient red volcanic soils are delivering Cabernet at Napa’s level without the Napa price tag. Same elevation-driven intensity as one of California’s most respected AVAs with none of the fame “Napa tax”. Schrader, Derenoncourt, and Beckstoffer already figured it out. Now you know why.

This wine is succulent and ripe but with an old-school feel. It opens out of the gate with some youthful grippy tannins, but these are in harmony with the explosion of aromatics, concentration of fruit and acidity! On the palate, plush, brambly black and red fruits, plum, cherry, blackcurrant layered and alive. Born from elevation and still young, with a long road of ever-improving enjoyment ahead. We know how these wines age from our history with them …Fabulously!

This is the type of wine, you buy some for yourself, lay it down and kick yourself in the ‘@ss’ later on, because you didn’t buy more! Trust me I know this feeling all too well. You fall in love with it and then there is no more! No more to share, no more to brag about..it’s just gone and you’re left with an empty bottle of wine to add to your cellar decoration as a clear reminder to buy again!

Three Pillars. One wine. Acid, concentrated fruit, and tannins are all present and accounted for. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

At $75 SRP this Cab is already a good conversation, but at $33 it’s a spy confession! The kind Napa vineyard owners don’t want getting around.

Every uninvited Operative needs a secret weapon stashed in the cellar. This is it!

94 Points - The Tasting Panel “Aside from teeth-grabbing tannins and an inner tension, this elegant red owns up to its aromatic foundation of violets and blackberries. Soy sauce and mocha settle on mid-palate, with graphite adding a persistent, structured mouthfeel.”