92-94 Points | International Wine Cellar , May/June 2012

Saturated deep ruby.  Wild, highly nuanced aromas and flavors of blackberry, cassis, chocolate, espresso, licorice, game and tobacco.  Dense and fine-grained, showing greater concentration than the regular Plumpjack cabernet but coming across as more monolithic today.  This very rich but youthfully tight wine will need at least several years in the bottle to lose some of its baby fat and show more detail.  But it has all the elements for a glorious evolution in bottle.  Assistant winemaker Jeff Owens told me that the fermentations are now hotter and faster for the Cade wines than previously (Cade and Plumpjack are under the same ownership), with less post-fermentation maceration, while at Plumpjack the fermentations are now a bit cooler than previously.  Although time on the skins is normally two to three weeks, he added, some lots get up to 60 days.  Both of these 2010s will be bottled in the fall.

96+ Points | Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate