Cape Mentelle Explorer’s Blend Petit Verdot Cabernet Merlot 2024
- 95
- $80
- Drink by: 2026-2044
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This was a warm vintage in Margaret River, and yet the quality of the red wines certainly hasn’t suffered. In fact, they’re some of the best in recent years. These combine power and poise in an elegant expression of this combination of fruit. Loads of leafy black currant. Rich dark plum and a decent sprinkle of spices. Palate is most intriguing with its combination of those primary black currant fruits with a slightly meaty, peppery character that gives it real lift and definition. It’s all harnessed with firm, slightly grainy tannins and a decent hit of oak. So yes, you can drink it in the short term, but it does have plenty of time in the cellar ahead of it.
Ray Jordan has been writing about wine for more than 40 years. His first articles were published in the early issues of national wine magazine Winestate in the late 1970s when he worked in Sydney as a newspaper correspondent. From 1989 Ray wrote more than 3000 columns as a regular newspaper wine columnist. He currently writes a regular column for the special business publication Business News and is one of the main contributors to national wine platform Wine Pilot. In 2017 Ray co-authored The Way it Was – A History of The Early Days of the Margaret River Wine Industry and previously wrote Wine in the Blood: Australia’s Family Wine Estates, published in Mandarin and English. In 2011 Ray was awarded WA Wine Press Club Jack Mann Memorial Medal for his contribution to the WA wine industry. His love of wine is as strong as his love of the blues and tasting the thousands of wines that cross his bench each year allows him to indulge in both.
