2019 Stone the Crows Cabernet Sauvignon Fallen Feather Three Twins Vineyard Napa Valley 750 ml

In 2017, Town & Country magazine’s Jay McInerney called Thomas Rivers Brown the “most successful winemaker in California.” At the time Brown already had TWENTY-FIVE 100-point wines to his name. A year later, Wine Spectator planted him on their cover with the headline, “The Midas Touch of Thomas Rivers Brown.”

The story of how Rick Talmadge, proprietor of Stone the Crows, enlisted Brown is one that, strangely enough, didn’t start with wine. “When Rick and I were trying to meet, we both happened to be in Paris,” Brown told us, “so we had our first meeting on the Champs-Élysées. We had a beer in one of the bistros—that got the ball rolling.”

As Spectator’s James Laube put it, Brown has “learned how to pick his wine partners. All of his clients have A+ vineyards.” Talmadge’s vineyard is one of them—the 4.5-acre Three Twins site in Conn Valley, which produces what Vinous’ Antonio Galloni calls “one of the most distinctive wines in Napa Valley.” 

“There are multiple exposures, some flat, mostly on steep slopes that run straight downhill looking southeast to Lake Hennessey and northeast to Pritchard Hill,” Brown explained. 

TRB wines inspire unmatched demand. On one of the days that Laube visited Brown for the Spectator story, the writer marveled that, within an hour after Brown informed his mailing list about a new wine, most of the 1000 cases he was offering vanished. We see the same phenomenon when on the rare occasion that we get Brown’s wines, so keep that in mind as you ponder grabbing some of our tiny share.