This may be one of the biggest deals of the year! We just landed a parcel of 2021 Acumen “Peak” Cabernet at a crazy price, and the wine is phenomenal. The Acumen estate sits high on Atlas Peak, producing intense, powerful, structured Cabernets with real mountain character. The winemaker behind the project is none other than Phillip Corallo-Titus of Chappellet fame. Phillip has decades of experience crafting long-lived, 100-point Cabernets, and his pedigree really shows in this wine. Atlas Peak sits just south of Pritchard Hill and shares much of the same terroir: elevation, rocky volcanic soils, and an arid climate that forces the vines to produce meager amounts of deeply concentrated fruit. The 2021 Acumen “Peak” is the top barrel selection from the estate, hand-selected for purity, power, and true mountain expression. The wine is inky and potently aromatic, bursting with mulberry, crème de cassis, camphor, graphite, toasty oak spice, and crushed-rock minerality. Full-bodied and brooding, with a dense mid-palate and smoldering dark fruit that carries into a long, structured finish. It’s youthful and hedonistic right now, delivering all the mountain intensity and formidable concentration you’d expect from this site and vintage. Knowing how well Phillip’s wines age, including Chappellet’s famed Pritchard Hill bottling, I think this has at least 20 years of longevity ahead of it, if not more. This is legit mountain-grown Napa Cabernet, from a great vintage, from a top 100-point winemaker, for an absolute steal.