A Red Christmas Give them California Cabs.

Still need a gift for someone who likes wine? Or are you going to a dinner party and want to show up with a bottle or two?

If you’re buying for victims of the trend-mongering wine publications, forget it: Those Beanie Baby Napa Valley Cabs are simply not available on short notice, at any price. But if your host (or sister-in-law, or daughter’s fiance appreciates a good red without being neurotic about the latest hype, you can do very well with a quick stop at any decent wine shop.

Cabernet from one of California’s established wine estates is truly the gift that keeps on giving. It can provide immediate satisfaction or improve for years in the cellar (or a dark closet). Here are some of your best choices.

* Michel-Schlumberger is an outstanding Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon property. Billed as a “benchland estate” in Dry Creek Valley, it might be more accurately described as a linked set of vineyards in the contoured high ground of Wine Creek Canyon on the west side of Dry Creek Valley. The vineyard was originally planted by Michael Rowan, who also developed Jordan Vineyards in Alexander Valley.

Winemaker Fred Payne worked in Napa Valley for several years (primarily at Girard Winery) before moving to Sonoma County in 1989, his first vintage at Michel-Schlumberger. He was one of the first California winemakers to integrate vineyard management and winemaking skills into a complete European-style winemaking program. His wines are consistently big yet finely structured, like very ripe Bordeaux.

* Laurel Glen is the masterwork of renaissance man Patrick Campbell: grape grower, winemaker, Zen monk, violinist, philosopher, writer and, however reluctantly, marketing whiz. Campbell’s estate is a steep vineyard on the upper slope of Sonoma Mountain. Much of the surrounding land is part of Jack London State Park. (London lived on the mountain early in the 20th century and described its extraordinary beauty in a number of books, notably “The Valley of the Moon.”)

Campbell discovered the vineyard while living at a nearby Zen enclave and bought it in the late ‘70s. It was originally planted long ago, perhaps in Jack London’s time, and a few venerable old vines of odd varieties remain. Most of the vineyard, however, has been replanted with modern clones and rootstocks of Cabernet Sauvignon.

When Campbell released his ’89 in 1991, he was so angry about the vintage’s undeservedly bad reputation that he staged several blind tastings for writers and sommeliers in which he included ’89 Laurel Glen in a group of ’89 First Growth Bordeaux. The majority of tasters ranked the Laurel Glen first.

Since then, I have consistently included Laurel Glen Cabernet Sauvignon in tastings of my favorite Bordeaux, and it always shows well. The exercise demonstrates not only that Laurel Glen is a world-class wine but also how a single-vineyard wine can express the wild beauty of a place like Sonoma Mountain.

* A different kind of beauty is expressed in the wines from Gundlach-Bundschu’s Rhinefarm Vineyard, a broad, sun-drenched slope in the southern Sonoma Valley whose wines generally express an easier, brighter, more open fruitiness. Rhinefarm was originally planted 140 years ago by Jacob Gundlach, a founding member of the Buena Vista Viticultural Society with California wine visionary Agoston Haraszthy. Gundlach’s daughter married San Francisco businessman Charles Bundschu, and the two men became partners in 1878.

Long story shortened: Today the fifth and sixth generations of the Bundschu family are producing consistently excellent and distinctive wines from the Rhinefarm Vineyard. The Rhinefarm style--gracious but firm wines with luxurious fruit and wonderfully chewy texture--was set by winemaker Lance Cutler through the ‘80s. For the last decade or so, the winemaker has been Linda Trotta, who has refined the style with added clarity and brightness. The distinctive label, featuring baby Bacchus riding a California grizzly bear, adds extra gift value.

* Over the hill from Sonoma is California’s Cabernet treasure house. No other California wine community got started earlier, or worked with more focused energy, on defining and refining a signature varietal than Napa Valley has with Cabernet Sauvignon. For that reason there are quite a few established Cabernet estates in the appellation.

Several are in the rugged Vaca Range that defines the valley’s east side. Chief among them is Chappellet Vineyards, which was one of the original new wave Napa Valley wineries and has quietly remained one of its best for nearly 30 years.

Chappellet occupies a world of its own on Pritchard Hill, a small mountain east of Rutherford with a wide variety of micro-climates and volcanic soils. The remarkable winery, a half-subterranean pyramid roofed with weathered steel, has been described as looking like a crash-landed spaceship.

Since its founding in 1968 by Donn and Mollie Chappellet, it has been something of a winemaker star-factory, serving as a proving ground for such tannin-stained veterans as Philip Togni, Joe Cafaro, Cathy Corison and Tony Soter. As good as they were, and as stunning as most of their Chappellet wines have proved to be with extensive bottle age, none of them understood the complex Pritchard Hill vineyards so well or made such expressive wines from them as present winemaker Philip Corallo-Titus, whose first vintage was 1990.

The primary Chappellet estate wine is the Signature Cabernet Sauvignon. It tends to be a brawny, deeply concentrated and darkly herbaceous wine with a hidden elegance that emerges with age.

* Altamura is in a remote and rugged location in the Napa Valley’s eastern hills, south of Lake Hennessey in Wooden Valley. This high-altitude enclave has long been a source of big, intense red wines used to amp up the Napa Valley blends of such producers as Caymus, Mondavi and Pahlmeyer.

The 300-acre ranch (with 37 acres of vines) has been in Frank and Karen Altamura’s family since 1855. The grapes went to Mondavi for many years while Frank Altamura gained cellar experience working for such Napa Valley wineries as Sterling, Trefethen and Caymus. In 1985 he turned full time to making his own wines in a plush, full-bodied style.

* Terraces is a gem of a Napa Valley Cabernet estate. Proprietor Wayne Hogue, a retired Smith-Barney executive, developed his property under the tutelage of the Wagner family, proprietors of nearby Caymus Vineyards. The Wagners taught him how to make wine and provided Cabernet budwood from the Caymus vines. Additional budwood came from the Grace Family Vineyard.

On Charlie Wagner’s advice, Hogue obtained his Zinfandel budwood from a vineyard that Charlie Wagner recommended as the best Zin planting in Napa Valley (for those of you who have just discovered wine in the ‘90s, Caymus was once among California’s cutting-edge Zinfandel producers). The first crop went to Caymus but then, Hogue recalled, “Charlie Wagner said, ‘You should be making your own wine.’ ”

The first wines, an ’85 Zin and an ’86 Cabernet, were both made at Caymus. Now Hogue lives upstairs from his small, efficient winery. He makes the wine himself and tends the vineyard with full-time help from his daughter, Becky, and her husband. The estate is a magical place tucked into a small canyon on the east side of the Silverado Trail in the Rutherford appellation.

Hogue’s living room windows overlook the terraces where, he says, he’s seen foxes, bobcats, pileated woodpeckers and wild turkeys, adding, “And I’ve heard mountain lions, so I know they’re around too.” A typical Terraces Cabernet is a sumptuous wine with aging potential; it has a wonderful softness layered over a firm structure.

By the way, don’t worry too much about vintage. That’s more important in Europe than in California, where irrigation and other practices tend to smooth over variations from year to year.

There are subtle differences, of course. At the moment there are 1996s and ‘97s on the shelves (but if you happen top spot a ‘95, seize it and drink it yourself). Paradoxically, most ‘96s are still fairly tight for immediate drinking despite their extra year of bottle age, while the ‘97s tend to be softer and more approachable. But good wines from both vintages are well worth laying down for at least five years, so there’s no hurry to pop those corks.

Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits Magazine.