Lerner Project, Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon, 2019

My wife has a very reliable test for whether a wine is genuinely special: she puts her phone down. Not beside the glass, not face-down on the table — properly down, forgotten, irrelevant. It happens perhaps four or five times a year. I opened the LERNER PROJECT 2019 on a quiet Sunday evening, poured two glasses without ceremony, and within ten minutes her phone was on the other side of the room and we were deep into one of those unhurried conversations you don't realise you've missed until you're suddenly in the middle of one. That's JEB DUNNUCK 96 POINTS doing exactly what it should. ​ OAKVILLE is the most coveted benchland in all of Napa Valley, and winemaker Russell Bevan — Wine Spectator's Winemaker of the Year, no less — aged this beauty for 18 months in 100% new French oak, hand-selecting three coopers to build individual layers of personality into every barrel. ​ Jeb Dunnuck awarded 96 POINTS, calling it a wine of "terrific freshness and purity" with "another sexy mouthful of great Cabernet" and ageing potential stretching a full 15 years. Having sat with this bottle for an entire Sunday evening, we'd struggle to argue with a single word of that. ​ Iron, blue fruits, crushed blackberry and dark plum, opening into graphite, toasted cedar and dark chocolate, with a finish of quiet, unhurried authority that simply will not quit. We finished the bottle. Obviously. Some wines demand your full attention — this is absolutely one of them.