2022 Color and Sound Cabernet Sauvignon Yountville Napa Valley 750 ml

“Making 98-point Napa Cabernet?” laughed the ex-Opus One winemaker. “That’s simple.”

We were strolling through one of the class-A Yountville vineyards whose grapes he had blended into the 2022 Color and Sound Napa Cabernet: a masterful, opulent, cedar-kissed bombshell wrapped in polished tannins. We’d just sealed the deal—including signing an ironclad NDA—on what we knew to be one of the greatest Cabernet bargains in recent memory.

The winemaker, who Wine Spectator once called one of California’s best, stopped, planted his walking stick in the gravelly silt loam soils, and surveyed the sloping vines that had minted countless top-scoring wines for him over the years. “Yeah, making great wine is easy. It’s the math that’s hard.”

“You custom farm your vineyards. You trim the clusters once on the vine before harvest, then you do it again on the sorting table in front of the fermentor. You age the wine in French barrels—half new, or more. Of the 150 tons of grapes you end up purchasing, you select just 25 barrels for the final cut.”

Tighter bank purse strings and 8% interest rates can bite even for winemakers at the top of the game. Luckily, math is our strong suit, and it’s why some of the biggest names in the valley come to us with wines that need to move but that can’t, for one reason or another, wear their prestigious estate labels.

On the back of a tech sheet, we’d sketched the terms that had won him over: by knocking the price down to an impossible-to-beat $25, we knew we could all but guarantee a sell-out. That solved his cashflow problem­—and created a conundrum for our members: How much to buy?