Vintage Ridge Monte Bello 1999

Ridge Vineyards picks each grape by hand from its sustainably farmed vineyards. Monte Bello is their top wine – a Cabernet blend from the only piece of limestone grape-growing soil in California, the Monte Bello mountain, This is the best of the everything they produce, consistently scoring 97-100 points with critics. 93% percent of the wine sat in American oak barrels and the remaining 7% in French oak for 18 months. The conjunction of intense black fruit, firm acid, and well-integrated tannin has produced one of the finest vintages of the 90s.

From the excellent 1999 vintage, this is a turbocharged smorgasbord of blackcurrant, violets, vanilla, tobacco and cedar. It’ll be amazing now, but still has further to go and could potentially age another 10 years or more.