Winemaker Notes
Blend: 97% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Malbec
Professional Ratings
-
Australian Wine Companion
A meld of 3 blocks, strewn with lighter silts, screes of ironstone and clay loams. Hand picked, cold soaked; pumped over in open-top fermenters. A minimum of 21 days on skins before élévage in French wood (50% new) for just over a year. As always, an immensely classy and richly flavoured wine, shaped as much by a curl of juicy, precise and beautifully alloyed tannins, as it is by the sheath of blueberry, currant, sage, graphite and dried herbs. The frame of cedar oak, all class. The finish is tenacious, ferrous and densely packed with a nascent energy auguring for much more to come. Bury this.
-
Wine Enthusiast
Detailed and “of somewhere” (in this case, the cool hills of Clarendon in McLaren Vale), this beauty opens with heady aromas of raspberry coulis, beef jerky, Chinese five spice, mint chocolate and dried florals. It’s a powerful wine but a shapely one, slinking around the tongue—the spiced red-berry flavors fresh, silky and persistent, even within a frame of muscular sinewy tannins.
-
Wine Spectator
A stunning, velvety red, with hints of dried spearmint, resin, toasted tobacco and bay leaf, plus fresh earth accents to complement the spiced plum, kirsch and huckleberry notes. Long, expressive finish, where the tannins firm up pleasantly.
A noble variety bestowed with both power and concentration, Cabernet Sauvignon enjoys success all over the globe, its best examples showing potential to age beautifully for decades. Cabernet Sauvignon flourishes in Bordeaux's Medoc where it is often blended with Merlot and smaller amounts of some combination of Cabernet Franc, Malbecand Petit Verdot. In the Napa Valley, ‘Cab’ is responsible for some of the world’s most prestigious, age-worthy and sought-after “cult” wines. Somm Secret—DNA profiling in 1997 revealed that Cabernet Sauvignon was born from a spontaneous crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc in 17th century southwest France.
Known for opulent red wines with intense power and concentration, McLaren Vale is home to perhaps the most “classic” style of Australian Shiraz. Vinified on its own or in Rhône Blends, these hot-climate wines are deeply colored and high in extract with signature hints of dark chocolate and licorice. Cabernet Sauvignon is also produced in a similar style.
Whites, often made from Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc tend to be opulent and full of tropical, stone and citrus fruit.