Review: Taltarni Reserve Shiraz Cabernet 2019. Taste the future (or at least, taste this in the future)

August 24, 2021

Review: Taltarni Reserve Shiraz Cabernet 2019. Taste the future (or at least, taste this in the future)

A fascinating wine to taste in context of the other Taltarni reds. This Taltarni Reserve Shiraz Cabernet 2019 is so achingly backward, so future-focussed that it’s a hard wine to rate now. It’s the sort of wine that you peer into and puts up a wall. A wall of tannins, warming alcohol, stern acidity. Compared to the somewhat open Old Vine Shiraz this could come from a different year.

When I first opened it I wasn’t a fan. Unapproachability in liquid form. But the more you look, the more you admire the lines (I did). It’s not actually an obvious wine – sure, there’s this dark, enveloping choc mint blackness, but it’s not obvious at all. Full-bodied, but also not sweet-fruited or lavish. Again, lines of tannin, lines of molten power.

After two days open in the fridge, this was just revealing itself, which says it all. A twenty or thirty-year wine (if the quality cork holds), that just needs your patience.

Taltarni Reserve Shiraz Cabernet 2019. Best drinking: not now. Oh no. Maybe five years. Then drink from ten years to whenever. 18.5/20, 94/100+. 14.5%, $75. Taltarni website. Would I buy it? Only for the cellar. Actually, this would be a super birth year wine! I should get one for my daughter.

2019, Pyrenees, Shiraz Cabernet blends, Top Wine

Andrew Graham was once voted the 23rd most trusted wine critic on the planet. A WCA Journalism Young Gun now old hack with 25yrs as a buyer, judge, journalist, marketer and too much more.

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3 responses to “Review: Taltarni Reserve Shiraz Cabernet 2019. Taste the future (or at least, taste this in the future)”

Jeremy Blackman

August 25, 2021 at 9:55 am

Nice review. How do you know a wine like this will all come together / soften? What are the key characteristics? Is there always a chance it could go the other way and become more unapproachable? We opened a Dalwhinnie 2012 Cab last week – oh boy, did we do *that* too early! We have another, thankfully, but it was potent! (Like your prediction for the Taltarni though, I do think it will be a pretty amazing wine – but in about 15 years! I guess it’s the qualities I see in it that are brilliant but just a bit big and fighting for supremacy at the moment…)

Reply
1. Andrew Graham
  
  August 25, 2021 at 1:44 pm
  
  There’s always a chance for it to dry out and become a husk of tannins, alcohol and acidity. But the tannins aren’t astringent, they’re not hard (like they have been in some previous years) and there is genuine fruit generosity. All bodes well. As you say with that Dalwhinnie, some of these classic Pyrenees Cabs can take forever to come around.
  
  Speaking of Dalwhinnie, now that the Fogarty family own it we might see a return to the heydays too!
  
  Reply
Mahmoud Ali

August 25, 2021 at 9:11 pm

Hi Jeremy,

A couple of years ago I opened a bottle of 1981 Taltani Cabernet. It was 38 years old, in fine form, and in no danger of falling over. My mates thought it was a Bordeaux.

With a reserve bottling, and by the sounds of Andrew’s description, I’m sure it will go the distance with ease. One caveat though, if you open a bottle in five to ten years the fruit will have dissipated but the tannins will still need more time and you might be led to believe that the wine is dead or fruitless. Don’t be deceived, it is just in a dumb phase where the underlying fruit is overshadowed by the structure and tannins. The wine will continue to evolve, the tannins will subside, the fruit re-emerge, and the wine will come into balance. With this kind of wine drink it young or drink it old, but not imbetween. That has been my experience with old bottles of Taltarni and Tahbilk.

Cheers ………………. Mahmoud.

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