B.R. Cohn Olive Hill Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 1996

B.R. Cohn doesn't get a lot of press. Sitting in the relatively unpopulated southern Sonoma Valley, Cohn quietly makes stellar Cabernet and outstanding olive oil, both for reasonable prices. Luckily for me when I first came to San Francisco K&L had a huge selection of vintage bottles of Cohn's estate cab, which is one of the most refined in Sonoma in my opinion.

The nose on this beautiful Cabernet was rich and redolent of licorice, plum and dried figs. There was a tremendous depth of aroma here and an intensity suggestive of thick tar. The palate really got into the secondary and tertiary flavours, with tar, tobacco, and cigar box rolling over each other as the palate developed. Still, this had a distinctly warm-climate approach with a lot of fruit concentration and depth of fig, plum and dried black cherries. Amazingly, while many wines might simply be described as herbal, here I could cleanly detect distinct herbs such as thyme and sage. The mid-palate was also undergirded by a touch of earth. This is a stellar Cabernet and at a price that belies its complexity.

Excellent to Excellent+
$40 at K&L