Quite shocking that CLASSIFIED missions haven’t been shut down. We’ve been stirring the hornet’s nest, poking the bear, and waking up sleeping dogs relentlessly, and Ops, and many of you have become too good at sleuthing out what these wines are…

Either way, we’re back at it with another brilliant CLASSIFIED.

To distract the adversaries and provide minimal clues, we’ll focus heavily on the price today. This wine is legit $145. Today, at $58, it’s the absolute LOWEST any vintage of this flagship Cab has ever been, anywhere, at any given time in history. Since the inaugural 1995 (oops, a clue slipped out).

As you well know, the only way we could secure it for this price is that it had to be CLASSIFIED.

For obvious reasons, these wines are so good, so scarce, or so exclusive that they must hide behind a closely guarded veil of secrecy. You rarely, if ever, see them discounted. Revealing the name would put our livelihood at stake. This biz is built on relationships and not wanting to ruffle feathers; sometimes, it’s a necessary precaution to redact information.

Back to the price. Ironically, that $145 retail is really LOW for what this wine is truly worth. We’re gonna say it: in Pacific Northwest terms, it’s what Opus One is to Napa, what Almaviva is to Chile, etc. Funny how, in a comparison with the latter icon, Wine Spectator once wrote, “Despite the high quality of both wines, it’s still hard to swallow their prices. Unfortunately, the high prices are there for a purpose, which is, ironically, to make sure the wines are noticed. The logic presumes that if they’re priced too low, the wines won’t gain the respect of the world wine-drinking cognoscenti.”

They obviously didn’t see Wine Spies and their legendary Classifieds coming, eh?!

We’re not at HQ today - too risky - but on Red Mountain, another huge clue, and the last nugget we’ll drop before they come and find us. As Wine Enthusiast says, “Red Mountain has established itself as not only Washington’s premier winegrowing region, but one of the finest in the world. Once a well-kept secret, the recent boom in plantings and investments has served notice: Red Mountain has arrived.”

Quite frankly, without this wine, that would have never been. A founding member of the joint venture is on record saying that up there “It was nothing but sagebrush and prairie dogs.”

Last word by the foremost critic of all things Washington, “for years I’ve unabashedly been a sucker for one of the finest stops on Red Mountain,” he writes for this wine, and on this vintage, “a great wine… round and smooth with good viscosity and underlying verve… This is really well-done.”

Ahem. Nuff said. We risked a lot already… better find a cave, see ya!