There’s little doubt that this issue’s most memorable wine has been a difficult one to decide upon. Each of the two best Australian wines I have tasted while compiling it have been reviewed elsewhere as part of detailed tastings from their cellars. So I have had to separate two great Australian cabernets, the Petaluma Coonawarra 1998 and the Cullen Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 1998, an unenviable if not entirely unpleasant duty. The Cullen wine wins for its fineness and elegance, which I’m first to admit is a personal thing. In these days of increasingly concentrated and stocky Australian wines I feel that a cabernet blend that can offer almost indescribable depth of flavour while retaining unmistakable elegance and fineness has the edge in class over one just a little more robust, even if it’s a fine and very debatable line. The poise and suppleness of the new Cullen is simply extraordinary. If you were looking for a wine from this stable to compare more closely with the Petaluma 1998 it would be the 1995 wine; the 1998 is just that little bit more artful. Wines like Cullen Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, Moss Wood Cabernet Sauvignon, Howard Park Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, Mount Mary Quintet, Yarra Yarra Cabernets, Cape Clairault’s The Clairault, Katnook Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and Yeringberg’s cabernet blend are becoming increasingly important today. Too many cabernet makers are being seduced by the lure of the American wine review or else are convinced that the more their cabernet resembles their shiraz, the more likely it is to sell. In too many cases this means cabernet varieties picked later than ideal and made with a view to beefing them up as much as possible with alcohol, oak and tannin so that any semblence they might have had to fineness or trueness to type have vanished long before bottling. I guess the wheel will turn again some day. Meantime, it would do a lot of Australian winemakers a great deal of good to taste the sort of wine that Vanya Cullen is making today. Three thousand chateaux in Bordeaux can’t have got it that far wrong!
