Bec Hardy Cabernet Sauvignon 2023
- 91
- $38
- Drink by: 2024-2034+
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A warm climate Cabernet which succeeds in delivering serious flavour. After open batch fermentation for eight days on skins, the wine had ten months maturing in a mix of new and older French oak hogsheads. The colour here is a near opaque dark maroon. The nose weaves through notes of tobacco leaves, soy, beef stock, campfire hints and aniseed. A savoury style with good intensity, this is one for the long haul and will surely be even better in eighteen months. There is focus, drive, length and good grip with firm tannins and a flick of acidity. More formal than some of this team’s wines, but none the worse for that. It will provide attractive drinking for more than a decade.
Ken was born and bred in Brisbane, Queensland. He had a non-trendy, perfectly happy childhood, in a family convinced alcohol meant instant condemnation to Hades. But a break fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, and some good wine, started a serious obsession that eventually took over. It did not stop Ken being chastised later for drinking Pol champagne, disgusted he’d drink anything made by a Cambodian dictator. Now, Ken mostly writes on wine, champagne and spirits for various newspapers, magazines and books, but is perhaps best known for his work in The Courier Mail. He also has a little sideline writing on cigars, fishing, travel and food. When not writing, fly-fishing for trout in NZ or bonefish on the flats of Cuba, travelling or smoking cigars, he is no doubt following a variety of sporting teams – the occasionally glorious Queensland Reds rugby, the dysfunctional Washington Redskins, the dodgy Arsenal and especially revels in the world restored to its proper axis with the return of the Ashes to their rightful home.
