2013 Tom Cullity Cabernet Sauvignon Malbec

The 2013 Tom Cullity Cabernet Sauvignon Malbec is today 12 years from its harvest and marks the beginning of the Tom Cullity cuvée, a Cabernet Malbec made from the original vines on the Vasse Felix property, planted in 1967. While the Tom Cullity style is inherently elegant, I recall this wine being rich and fulsome upon its release, however today—and, in fact, earlier this year—the wine has begun to evolve into the elegant thing it will become in time, many decades from today. There are notes of nori, licorice, dark chocolate, earth and tapenade.

Elegant and lifted with crushed violet, dusty cedar and mulberry at the fore followed by some subtle celery salt savouriness with air. This is very youthful with lovely lifted perfume. The palate is similarly elegant, gliding high through the mouth with notes of dried florals, plum, graphite, gravel and bay leaf before a fine sheath of grainy tannins frame it all up along with a cool, bright line of acid to draw significant length. Elegant, poised, lithe, detailed. This in an exceptional place with youthful exuberance and brilliant complexity.

Their first vintage of this wine. 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Malbec, 4% Petit Verdot. All fruit was grown in Vasse Felix’s vineyard in Wilyabrup, and is from the first plantings. Rapidly cooling weather in March allowed extended ripening time for the reds and more traditional harvest timing through late March into April. Fruit parcels were picked in small blocks and fermented with 100% ambient yeasts. 52% was static fermented and macerated on skins for more than 20 days. 48% was open-fermented and macerated for 10–15 days on skins. The wine was fined with egg whites and racked before minimal filtration to bottle. Dark and fragrant and not dominated by Cabernet's typical cassis character, though of course that's firmly at the core. A touch of dark-red fruit lifts this to a more nuanced whole. Notable youth and freshness. Extreme tannic finesse. Just a little minty as it opens in the glass. Silky smooth, long and refined. (JH)