I’d been giving my buddy Zack a hard time for a few weeks now. He runs my favorite local wine bar, a place I regularly come to write after work, and he’s in charge of those “evil vending machines” that serve wine by the pour. For a while now, it had featured the same Cabernet Sauvignon, which was excellent, but no longer exciting after I had imbibed so many glasses. I wanted to try something new.  “Flora Springs okay?” he texted me one afternoon, as if I actually had a say in the matter. “Never had it,” I replied. But tonight I did, and I am an instant fan of this wine and, by extension, this winery.

The 2013 Flora Springs Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley is an outstanding wine by any measure. After a relatively predictable nose, an incredibly complex assault on the palate by this full-bodied beauty left me looking from left to right, swishing, aerating (slurping obnoxiously in a way that one can really only get away with in solitude or at a wine bar) and trying like hell to figure out what all the flavors were. Though I’m sure I didn’t nail them all, I wound up fixated on vanilla and blackberry with the faintest hints of cola.  Lush yet well-structured with the finest of overly dry tannins that linger endlessly on the palate through a long dry finish, this was one of those rare, special glasses of wine that I truly didn’t want to end, the kind of wine that makes it a bad idea to order another glass of anything else in its wake.

At $29.99, it scrapes just under the cutoff point on my scale, and gets full marks for value. Even at $30/bottle, I’m willing to call this a great QPR; it drinks like a much more expensive Napa Cab, and far better than many I’ve had that cost twice as much. 94 points on my scale, and very highly recommended.