Adelaide Thomas Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma Valley 2019

We are back with yet another unreal opportunity on a bottle from Sonoma’s Adelaide Thomas. If you liked their 2021 Cabernet and/or want to try a more settled-in vintage, we have their fierce and seductive 2019 Cab.

We start out innocently enough, with a very alluring nose of marionberry jam, caramel sauce, warm oak, and tomato leaf. The dark purple fruits smell like they’re encircled with bright red cherries and sprinkled with beauty powder. Lovely. The palate is where things get intense. Deepest, ripest blackberry and a freshly felled cedar tree walk you into tart Montmorency cherry and crushed granite. A swoony, Syrah-like lick of bacon emerges – especially if you decant this for an hour – and the tannins on the finish tell us this has lots of road left if you want to cellar a few bottles. But the final finish, if you will, comes full circle to the sweetheart start: once those tannins recede, wood-roasted yellow peaches are all that’s left on the table. Delicious. Our guess is that this is unfiltered, which nicely accentuates the Sonoma wildness. A sleek and predictable Napa Cab this is not.

Adelaide Thomas is a tiny operation run by Elizabeth Pollock and her husband Chad. They fell into winemaking a few years ago when they were looking to escape San Francisco’s cold summers and bought a 42-acre mountain property in Sonoma County with an old winery on it. They make the wines with the help of friends and mentors. For the price, you can pick up something boring at the store, or you can discovering a handmade, small-batch gem with character.