Bates Ranch sits at the far southern tip of the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Mount Madonna, planted in the early 1970s and dry-farmed on a steep slope well above a thousand feet. It's a historic Cabernet site whose fruit went into some of the region's benchmark bottlings decades ago, and Ian Brand treats it with the seriousness it deserves. This is emphatically not valley-floor Cabernet: no plush, no chocolate, no weight for weight's sake. Instead you get tart red currant and black cherry, tobacco leaf and forest floor, framed by firm, faintly rustic tannin and real acidity. Old-school California Cab, and it will reward some patience.