2017 Pascual Toso Cabernet Sauvignon Reserva Barrancas Vineyard Mendoza 750 ml

Pascual Toso’s Barrancas Cabernet has been our South American white whale. Made by 100-point Napa legend Paul Hobbs, known for his work at Opus One and $500 single-vineyard Cabernet under his own label, from one of the most impressive vineyards in Mendoza, it’s a stunning bottle of wine with intrigue and power, made doubly impressive by its price.

Unfortunately, there just isn’t that much of it made, so it’s been over two years since we’ve been able to offer it to our members. In the meantime, their Reserva Malbec has remained one of our hottest wines, selling out quickly vintage after vintage—but our inquiries about the Cab were met with a polite “sorry.”

We’re nothing if not persistent, and are thrilled to finally re-introduce their stunning single-vineyard Cabernet with the spectacular 2017—a 92-point gem that challenges Napa and Bordeaux bottlings three times as expensive for complexity and sheer pleasure. These are the first and last bottles of this vintage we’ll offer: The wine is spoken for the world over, and Paul-Hobbs-minted Cabernet at this price has a tendency to disappear pretty quickly.

Tasting the wine reminds us why we fell in love with the winery years ago. Bold and rich, it’s packed with aromas of blackberries, cassis, tobacco, and graphite, which segue into a mouth-coating combination of plums, blackcurrants, and unsweetened chocolate. We expect a lot of value from Pascual Toso, but this delivers on another level.

Visiting the winery, you can’t help but notice their obsession with quality. Our first clue that something special was happening was when we witnessed the calicatas, or test pits, dug up between the rows. At the bottom of one excavation, you might find exposed granite; just a few yards away, a hole bottoms out in dense clay. These pits, we were told, marked a renaissance in the region’s winemaking, signaling a desire to uncover, understand, and capture the nuances of terroir.

Many of the best expressions of Cabernet hail from Las Barrancas in Maipú, where Pascual Toso’s best vineyards are located. What’s unique here is the slightly lower altitude in Mendoza, making for a plush wine that drinks like a Margaux-Calistoga hybrid and pairs like a dream with grilled lamb and beef. Warm temperatures and blazing sunlight virtually guarantee perfect levels of ripeness for the grapes, while westerly winds, along with steeply dropping temperatures at night, keep things fresh and cool.

The Cabernet Reserva is made entirely from estate-grown fruit in Las Barrancas, and sees a premium treatment in the cellar, aged for a year in new oak, 20% French and 80% American. Layered on top of the ripe, bold fruit, all the spice and rich oak give this wine an almost unfair edge on the competition, a mix of black fruit, wood, and spice that is so easy to drink and a luscious dinner pairing.

This is a wine that’s worth the two-year wait on our end. Your table, on the other hand, probably could use a bottle tonight.