Category	Red Wine
Varietal	Cabernet Sauvignon
Region	California, Napa Valley, Howell Mountain
Brand	Dunn Vineyards
Alcohol/vol	13.9%

Stones and walnuts with blackberries and blueberries. A full-bodied, super-refined and polished wine that culminates in a racy and refined finish. Extremely long and exciting. Great wine.

More opulent, soft, and approachable than most past vintages, the 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain nevertheless offers beautifully classic Howell Mountain notes of crème de cassis, leafy herbs, forest floor, licorice, and spring flowers. These all carry to a full-bodied wine that has a stacked mid-palate, lots of sweet tannins, and terrific balance as well as remarkable purity of fruit. The old dogma of Dunn's Howell Mountain Cabernet never being ready won't be the case with this beauty, since it's already offering tons of pleasure and charm. It should easily evolve for another 20-25 years or more.

The 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain is classic Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon, with plenty of licorice, blackcurrant and blackberry fruit, forest floor and background oak and earth. It is full-bodied, showing wonderfully sweet tannin and a long, layered finish. It does strike me as somewhat more approachable in its youth than Randy Dunn's Cabernets would have been. Certainly, this will age for 25 or more years.

The 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain is one of the most exotic, flamboyant young wines I have ever tasted from Randy and Mike Dunn. Graphite, cherry liqueur, smoke, licorice, plums and crème de cassis, open up in an alluring Cabernet Sauvignon that melds together ripeness and structure. The fruit is distinctly red-toned in 2012, with fewer of the darker notes that are often present in the Howell Cabernet. Pliant and expressive, but with plenty of underlying tannin, the 2012 is shaping up to be a beauty. Best of all, it won’t need decades in the cellar to start drinking well.

Exhibits a sinewy core of dense currant, blackberry and dusty, fine-grained tannins that grip the palate and cling tightly, slowly easing to make way for subtle hints of licorice, anise and dried herb amid the underlying accents of rock and fresh-turned earth. Unabashedly tannic and seductive, in a style with presence. Drink now through 2030.- J.L.