Parker Coonawarra Estate Terra Rossa Cabernet Sauvignon 2021

Let’s celebrate wines that over-deliver. We need more of them. Parker Coonawarra Estate Terra Rossa falls easily into that category. This is $34 worth of determined flavour delivered in a warm, inviting embrace. It’s Cabernet Sauvignon down to its bootstraps, but far from vegetative. Instead, we enjoy aromas rich in a budding generosity with blackcurrant, mint, earth, anise and lively spice. Quiet but determined is the best description. Spice-ladden flavours mix with black fruits across a wide, flavour-packed palate with an additional touch of dried herbs, a black olive savouriness and lasting spice. The oak deserves special mention – 12 months in 100% French oak, 40% new – and its sweet oak cedar, toastiness really brings something extra together with a delivery of fine tannins. What value here! Now, I’m not suggesting for one moment that the maker put the price up. No! What I am suggesting is we enjoy this wine for its utter deliciousness and fair price. I can count on all fingers and toes wines that don’t deliver at their price point. This isn’t one of them.

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