2021 Kinfolk Cabernet Sauvignon Moon Mountain Sonoma County 750 ml

They said they’d never make a Cabernet Sauvignon. 

Why should they? They’ve been legendary pioneers of cool-climate Sonoma Pinot Noir since the 1980s. Today, their wines—ethereal, elegant, finessed—are iconic, mentioned in the same breath as Littorai, Rivers-Marie, and Kosta Browne. Robert Parker even praised their Pinot as one of the finest he’s tasted in California. 

Having won a sterling reputation with their elite expressions of the heartbreak grape, they were content to “leave the Cabs to the big boys in Napa”—a refrain we heard many times as they regaled starstruck fans in tasting rooms and dinners.

So imagine our immense surprise and intense curiosity when we got a call from the lead winemaker, who is known as much for his wit as his steely intellect. “So I made a Cabernet…” he began. For those of us in the wine biz, it’s a shift as unexpected—and exciting—as Dylan’s epochal switch to the electric snarl on Highway 61 Revisited.

What changed their mind? Cabernet from the Moon Mountain district east of Sonoma, hailed by Vinous’s Antonio Galloni as “one of the most exciting emerging appellations in California” and “one of California’s great terroirs.” It’s a place where wineries like Bedrock, Turley, and Di Costanzo are making some of their most stunning Cabs—wines with tremendous energy and precision, born of western exposures and rugged, sunny slopes.

The grapes were extraordinary. The wine is too, and the production for an experiment like this was small. When the busy season of the year kicked in, they realized that cranking up the marketing machine to explain why one of Sonoma’s most famous Pinot estates was releasing a Cabernet would be a consuming endeavor. So they gave us a call.