Stella Bella Skuttlebutt Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2021

Is it too early to start nominating your Best Value Wine of the Year? If not, my vote is in. The wine hails from Margaret River, is the archetypal Aussie red blend of Cabernet and Shiraz, and boasts a bit of a quirky name. Stella Bella’s Skuttlebutt 2021 Cabernet Shiraz is everything you want from a juicy, generously spicy, upfront, vibrant young red. It’s also blessed with unusually deep fruit concentration for the tiny $20 price tag. Deep, dark purple-black cherry in colour. Plum, bramble, blackberry, black pepper and dried herbs – with a touch of jalapeño piquancy – lift the bouquet. Smooth across the tongue, fuelled by super fine tannins and filled with delicious sweet fruited plumminess and blackstrap licorice with a just-picked red cherry bite. The finish with a lick of Margs’ distinctive, penetrating leafy/briar/mint speaks to the region and its premier grape variety, Cabernet. There’s so much to like and enjoy here, utterly slurpable.

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