Lot 146
2006 Diamond Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon

Cameron Hughes Lot 146, 2006 Diamond Mountain District, Nappa Valley I had no idea what to expect from Lot 146 as I did not read the literature before tasting it. I was impatient and only decanted for about 10 minutes before the first swirl. On the nose blackberries and Cassis, yes. The nose is not over powering. The first sip was not what I expected and really surprised me in a good way. I thought the wine would have been a lot drier. Lot 146 was tenaciously sweet at first and so I let it breath another 30 minutes. After it had opened up the sweetness had subsided to a ripe fruit. The mid palate is definitely pronounced. Powerful ripe fruit backed up by a Phalanx of tannins lead into a sensual and glutenous finish. Lot 146 is sexy! The kind of sexy that you just can’t find in a $15 bottle of California Cabernet. And now I know why: Lot 146 was sourced from a $90 program. Good thing I bought 3 bottles!

Recent Cameron Hughes Wine ratings from Wine Enthusiast Magazine - 92 Points, Editors Choice: Lot 146 Diamond Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon - 91 Points: Lot 149 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon - Best Buy: Lot 168 Red Hills Lake County Cabernet Sauvignon Plus, great scores for many more Cameron Hughes wines featured in the Wine Enthusiast Buying Guide.

Taking Advantage of the Wine Glut Amid an oversupply, Cameron Hughes buys top wineries' excess and resells it for bargain prices There is a glut of wine all over the world—an oversupply so significant that it's compelled Australian winemakers to plow up their vineyards, forced French producers to turn wines into ethanol and brought wealthy Napa vintners if not to their knees then to their bankers in search of refinance. The reasons are various—new vineyard plantings by ambitious producers, increased productivity at a time of plummeting demand, winemakers who have overleveraged their brands. The bulk wine market—which encompasses everything from wine in the barrel to finished wines in unlabeled bottles, aka "shiners"—may absorb some of this excess but with prices as low as $1 a gallon, it's not going to help winemakers raise very much money, let alone make them rich. Except in the case of Cameron Hughes. Mr. Hughes takes the $100 California Cabernets that have gone begging for buyers and sells the very same wines under his own labels for $25 a bottle and less. He packages them in generic-looking bottles with names like Lot 164 Rutherford Cabernet and Lot 135 Syrah and sells them on his website and to retailers like Sam's Club and Costco in 38 states. I'd first heard about Mr. Hughes a few months ago when I attended a dinner in Chicago hosted by a prominent wine collector. Almost every wine was a first-growth Bordeaux, grand cru Burgundy or cult California Cabernet costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars. But when one of the dinner guests, a fellow named Chris Freemott, began talking about an $18 California Pinot Noir he'd recently tasted that was an "incredible value," I pulled up a chair. This was a wine I could actually afford. The name of the producer was unfamiliar to me: Cameron Hughes. "His Lot 142 Pinot Noir is amazing," Chris said.