Birks Wendouree - Cabernet Sauvignon - 2015

In reviewing the wines of Wendouree each year, over the last seven years, from what I call ‘The Modern Era’, I feel I’ve well and truly got my eye in, one way or another. I think the Cabernet Sauvignon is perhaps the most quintessentially Clare/Australian/Wendouree of all the wines on offer. Every year, it’s the unapologetic one. You don’t like me? Well f*ck you then! Or something like that. It’s the Clare bush perfume of eucalyptus, aniseed and the like, along with fresh blackberry and blackcurrant, cedar and dusty earth. It often smells like a dry Australian forest after the rain has hit – petrichor – and equally evocative it is too. Medium bodied, firm and bony, kind of tense, but with a sweet redcurrant and blackcurrant small-berried intensity, the crunch of acidity and firm ropes of tannin, and a finish that’s intense and phenomenally long, tinged with bush perfume and the promise of forgiveness, given a couple of decades. It’s a very fine Cabernet. Unapologetically Australian, individual and magnificent. 96 Points Gary Walsh, The Wine Companion