Vasse Felix Tom Cullity Margaret River 2020

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From an excellent Cabernet vintage in Margaret River, Vasse Felix’s most premium red wine provides quite the ride as it evolves in the glass. Sweet clove and sticky date pudding leap from the glass, before cracked cardamom pod and peppercorn bring a cut of sweet and savoury spice. The fruit is aching to emerge to fill things out, and it does in the form of baked plum, mulberry, boysenberry and blackcurrant. A good swirl of the glass brings cohesion and further complexity in the form of nori salt, bay leaf, vanilla bean, tilled earth, dark chocolate, and ground coffee. The palate is cooling, mineral, lifted and vibrant with restrained power. Baked plum, boysenberry, mulberry pie, earth, and dark chocolate are bound up in silty cocoa-nib laced tannins and saline acidity to a cohesive and seemingly endless dark-chocolate infused closed. A wine of immense complexity, length and cellarability. This benefits from time in decanter, and would reward with a long rest in the cellar.

Tom Kline
Wine Critic at Winepilot

Tom Kline is a wine writer, reviewer, presenter, and educator based in Victoria, Australia. He is the Australian correspondent for the internationally respected publications Jasper Morris Inside Burgundy and Jane Anson Inside Bordeaux, where he highlights the top tier of Australian wine for a global audience. Tom also writes for leading outlets including Decanter (UK), Wine Spectator (US), and Halliday Magazine, among others. An experienced wine show judge and WSET educator, he has authored several consumer-focused wine courses aimed at making wine more accessible and engaging. In 2023, Tom was awarded Best Published Feature Article or Wine Column at the prestigious Wine Communicator Awards, presented by Wine Communicators of Australia.

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