Moss Wood Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2010
$90; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 93++++ points
I know, I know: $90 is a big ask for a drink of red, but this is no drink of red. Neither is it a fleeting dalliance - this is about as close as we get to sublime Cabernet. From one of Australia’s most renown vineyards in a knockout vintage, mature vines and the masterly touch of winemakers Clare and Keith Mugford, it’s a wine which the luckiest of us might still be relishing in thirty years – the Mugfords say their 2001 is only now beginning to lose some of its primary fruitiness, and that vintage was on a par with 2010. It’s a surly, confounding thing at first sniff: smudged and thick and furry with blueberry. As the great Brian Barry taught me thirty years ago, blueberry is a rare thing to capture in red wine, but when you have it, you’re rockin’. Blueberry’s not as pretty and floral a berry as many imagine. It’s nothing like black currant, for example: it has little of that floozy fresh immediacy of blackcurrant, or the naughty crème de cassis liqueur the Burgundians make from it. To me blueberry’s meaty and pithy with hints of juniper berry – I like to keep some in my fridge until they shrivel, so I can refresh my idea of what they’re like. Anyway, this majestic bear of a thing initially smells like pure blueberry pulp. But as the oxygen of the air seeps into it, it reluctantly lets loose weeps of anise, bitter cooking chocolate and fresh hewn blackwood. I suspect this latter tweak is not from oak – there’s barely any oak evident – but from the sheer weight of lignin pith the grapes grew all by themselves. It doesn’t appear to be ready to release any primary grape character. The wine is even more reluctant in the mouth, but trust Unca Phil: it truly is a beautiful beast that will be best after many years of cellar. It has astounding intensity and ideal balance: everything a great wine needs is in there in fine proportion. If you must trouble it young, give it a few hours of jug, and pour it into big glasses.
Lenton Brae Wilyabrup Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon 2009
$60; 14% alcohol; screw cap; 94++ points
Here we go again: this has bits of all the best of the Moss Wood, but with more vivacious, piquant primary fruit, in a much brighter, more elegant and fine frame. True to the precisely focused style of Ed Tomlinson, it has a sharp, steely attitude: all its components seem to have been polished and tweaked til they ping like the cutting edge of a Samurai blade. So while it has nearly all the bits that make the Moss Wood promising, each of them sports more sassy attitude and form: this is a slinky black panther compared to the Moss Wood’s grumpy hibernating grizzly. The oak here is more evident, but so are all its other bright bits: it tickles the nose with cordite and soot and sap and juniper, then sends in the soothers: blueberry and blackcurrant. Musk and confectioner’s sugars eventually pop through its bonnie top. It’s snaky and slinky in the mouth: sublimely tight and strapping, around steely whiprod acidity and very fine dusty tannins. In summary, it’s a more accessible tincture than the smudgy, mossy Mugford, more racy and cheeky and bright. Which is not to say some cellar won’t hurt: it probably won’t last as many decades, but it’s the brighter, more brilliant of the two in this its infancy. There’s a profound lesson in Cabernet for the wino who can afford to buy one of each of these. Open them on a Friday, and savour them over a whole weekend, watching how they open with the air. It’s cheaper than a holiday, and at least as much fun.
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