Driftwood Artifacts Meritage 2020

Meritage is a name not common to Australian wine labels. It’s a term more familiar among American winemakers and was coined to get around the use of the more geographically specific “Bordeaux blend.” It’s best to think of Meritage as a blend of traditional Bordeaux red grapes: cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, malbec and petit verdot. Driftwood’s Meritage highlights three of those grapes with only cabernet franc missing. Must say, the blend doesn’t miss cab franc in the least. This is quite the complete wine highlighting yet again – as if it needs to be said – just how at home the cabernet family of grapes feels in Margaret River soil.

Note the structure of this wine, it’s both velvet and tannin firm at the same time. It flows effortlessly across the tongue against a core of ripe black fruits; plum, earth, spice, dark chocolate, black strap liquorice. It’s both dense in flavour yet lifted thanks to some attractive aromatics. Boasts structure, length, line (and then some) and ripe, sweet fruit. Oak is blended into the whole. It’s there but it’s not so you can easily finger it and that’s good. Meets the price point and then some.