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.

Jeni Port

Wine critic at Winepilot

Jeni Port is one of Australia’s top wine communicators. Based in Melbourne, Jeni created the first wine column in the (then) Sun News-Pictorial before moving over to The Age and becoming that paper’s longest-serving wine writer. Over the years she has written for most Australian wine magazines and these days calls WinePilot home. She is also a Tasting Panel member on the Halliday Wine Companion. She was named Wine Communicator of the Year and Legend of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in 2014 and in 2018 Legend of the Vine. She is a founding board member of Australian Women In Wine and is the co-deputy chair of Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards and China’s Wine List of the Year Awards.

Wine writer and critic