2018 Stone the Crows Cabernet Sauvignon Three Twins Vineyard Napa Valley 750 ml

Thomas Rivers Brown’s Stone the Crows Cabernet is the very definition of Napa Valley rarity. 

Grown within shouting distance of the site behind BOND’s Melbury bottling, and released only to the mailing list, the double-97-point 2018 rendition has earned some serious words of praise from critics—“rapturous,” “positively stellar,” and “drop-dead gorgeous” among them. It’s also all but IMPOSSIBLE to find, but we managed to grab 30 cases—much to the delight of Wine Access members. 

In 2017, when Town & Country magazine’s Jay McInerney called Thomas Rivers Brown the “most successful winemaker in California,” Brown had a mere TWENTY-FIVE 100-point wines to his name. A year later, Wine Spectator planted him on their cover with the headline, “The Midas Touch of Thomas Rivers Brown.” 

As Spectator’s James Laube put it, Brown has “learned how to pick his wine partners. All of his clients have A+ vineyards.” Count Talmadge’s vineyard among them—the 4.5-acre Three Twins site in Conn Valley, which produces what Vinous’ Antonio Galloni calls “one of the most distinctive wines in Napa Valley.” 

The vineyard is planted to Cabernet Clone 337—which provides a rich, red-fruited, higher-toned profile—and Brown layers it with Clone 169 to add black fruit and muscle. The 2018 Stone the Crows flagship Cabernet spent 21 months in French oak and rested another nine months in bottle prior to release. 

On one of the days that Laube visited Brown for the Spectator story, he marveled that within an hour after Brown informed his mailing list about the wine, most of the 1000 cases he was offering vanished. That’s no surprise, given Brown’s cellar wizardry and the premium grapes that go into this special bottling.