One of the big problems with wine business these days is that most good wine, and especially wine with pretensions of be more than just good, is released, and drunk, far too young.

One hundred years ago this didn’t matter, even fifty. The main producer of fine wine at the time was Bordeaux and the majority of buyers were a few thousand extremely rich British aristos with large cellars in which they could lay the wine down for the decades it required to become drinkable.

Of course that world has long disappeared and even the conservative Bordelaise are now making wine to be drunk younger. But younger doesn’t mean “on release” especially when you are talking great cabernet sauvignons, whether they’re from.

These are wines at even by today’s accelerated standards will take many years to reach their full potential, but where are these mature wines? With the exception of the auction houses they just aren’t available.

Well, Napa Valleys famed Chateau Montelena have one answer. For a while they have held back a small proportion of each years production, and have now packaged two bottles each of the 1999, 2000 and 2001 vintages of their superb Estate Cabernet Sauvignon in a handsome wooden box, and offered it for sale through top retailers and the winery for $960.

I have tasted all three of these wines and they offer an undeniable refutation to the idea that vintages don’t really matter in California. Well, perhaps they don’t matter as much as in Bordeaux, but the pronounced differences in these three wines will be enough to convince anybody.

Interestingly, the 1999 is the least ready to drink, or it was when I tried it in April. It was tight and shut down but this often happens to great cabs – they go to sleep for a while, then wake up again.

The 2000 was dry but showed more generous fruit that the ’99, quite like a Bordeaux in style, while the 2001 was richer, rounder and altogether more generous.

But these are my impressions. The case comes with contemporary tasting notes by owner Bo Barrett, so taste and compare for yourself, and see what you think of these three great vintages of that rarest of creatures, a fully mature – or getting that way, anyway – California cab.