There’s no-one in much of a hurry at Cape Mentelle. Things tick over, ideas are considered, taken on board, tested, adopted or rejected. Nobody’s rushing to create the newest and jazziest wine style. They know what they do best and by and large, they’re happy doing it, slowly tinkering here and there to fine-tune their wines. The only thing ageing slower than managing director David Hohnen is his prized cabernet sauvignon, the company’s flagship wine. Hohnen is infuriating, hardly looking a year older than when I first met him thirteen years ago. Like most inhabitants of Margaret River, he surfs. His penetrative, seafaring gaze looks straight at you, reflective of a self-confidence and conviction essential for making serious, very serious wine. To stroll through a range of vintages of Cape Mentelle Cabernet Sauvignon is to watch the development, both physical and mental, of the gangling but talented adolescent into a mature but self-critical adult, still seeking ways to do things better. Superimposed over the vineyard’s unflagging ability to deliver intense, ripe and concentrated fruit flavours and Hohnen’s steadfast adherence to the style of red wine he believes the Margaret River makes best are the results of refinements in growing and making techniques expected of a mature wine company. It’s Hohnen’s belief that the winemaker ultimately has the greatest say in these wines, deciding when to harvest, what sort of oak to use, for how long the wine remains in wood and how new the oak is. ‘We’re aiming to find a balance between flavour, tannins and alcohol’, he says. ‘Today in the Margaret River we know that our best cabernets are made with riper fruit, between 13.5 and 14% alcohol. We don’t worry if the acids might look a little low provided everything else is in balance.’ In addition to using 75% new oak for the Cabernet Sauvignon, Hohnen keeps the wine in cask for around thirty months, well beyond the time given by most Australian cabernet makers. But such is the intensity of the cabernet flavour in his wines, a natural result of the very low crop levels he cultivates, that I have never tasted an over-wooded Cabernet Sauvignon from Cape Mentelle. The most recent Cabernet Sauvignons, 1992 to 1994 inclusive, present a step up in the intensity of oak-derived smoky, chocolate and vanilla oak characters without compromising a shard of fruit intensity. If anything, Hohnen’s more recent wines pack more fruit than their predecessors. The 1983 Cape Mentelle Cabernet Sauvignon is an odd wine to have won the Jimmy Watson Trophy for the best one year-old (and therefore unfinished) red at the Royal Melbourne Wine Show. You can take a flying leap into a glass of most Watson winners at only one year of age and emerge without a scratch. The 1983 Cape Mentelle is still dealing it out: an angular and slightly dischordant red of immense fruit and extract. Hohnen has every excuse: it was a filthy hot, drought vintage from which finely crafted and balanced wines are traditionally something of a scarcity. The tannins are hard, green and sappy, a sure reflection of the season and the fact that nobody worried too much about ripening tannins back then. If we didn’t have enough, we tossed it in from a sack. If they tasted sappy and bitter, too bad. The concept of ripening tannins still has to be adopted across the length and breadth of Australian viticulture. Ongoing research around the world is examining how sunlight can reduce the size of the polyphenol molecules which constitute tannins, reducing their aggressive qualities and promoting a fine-grained tightness which in no way detracts from a wine’s weight or longevity. Indeed, so superior is the integration of tannins and the consequent balance of many wines made from fully tannin-ripened fruit that they should actually develop in the bottle and last for longer than many wines more overtly and aggressively tannic in their youth. Something of an over-reaction to the 1983, the 1986 vintage is typical of what Australian winemakers were doing in this decade of largely wasted viticultural opportunity. With an accent on less ripe, less intense fruit, the wine lacks the fullness and structure of the modern Mentelle classics. Tough, hard edges exist where smoothness and softness should be, a sure result of excessive extraction to compensate for the wine’s lack of fruit weight. Everyone was doing it then. Fuller and rounder, the 1988 is developing nicely with earthy, leathery and cigarbox/cedar undertones beneath floral and sweet raspberry/cherry/cassis high notes. There’s a musky, animal hide note, while the tannins are riper and softer, completing a wine of fine balance and suppleness, even if there’s just a trace of bitterness. And then, after the excellent 1990 vintage, up pops the 1991, a majestic, sublime wine I have spectacularly under-estimated until preparing this article. Buy this gem on sight. It might be more refined and restrained than the sumptuous wines from 1992 and 1994, but it evokes the rare fineness and sophistication of a great Bordeaux. This seamless wine reveals plums, tobacco and truffles. It moves effortlessly down the palate, first suggesting one thing, then bursting with another. A big, chunky sleeper of a wine, the 1993 vintage reveals the greener flavours typical of the vintage, with earthy menthol flavours lifted by cedar, chocolate oak influences. I’m less happy with its integration of tannins and find them rather over-aggressive, even for a Cape Mentelle. Time will tell. Yet to be released, the 1994 wine has more than a touch of the ’91, although its framework is bigger in every direction. Plush, concentrated cassis/plum fruit with earthy, dusty complexity and dark flavours of coffee and chocolate are all revealed in this multi-layered wine of enormous potential. It’s a sumptuous, powerful but balanced claret which will sail into and beyond the second decade of the next century if given half a chance. Slowly scratching his beard, some of which has had the grace to turn grey, David Hohnen seems a little bewildered by the recent string of Margaret River vintages, each of which has given him and his neighbours every opportunity to make wine of the highest level. ‘The ’95s are brilliant, and the power and concentration of our ’96 is something else’, he says. ‘But it’s the ’97 that really has me. I’ve been at this game for around 25 years and should be getting tired of it all, but the ’97 is quite unreal. It’s incredible to think I can still be excited by a wine like that.’ Sadly, you and I are going to have to wait another four years to find out why.
