Wine for the patient: Yalumba Signature Cabernet Shiraz 2019

The good people at Yalumba often send a backup sample bottle of their cork-sealed premium wines.

That was a usual practice for trade and media samples twenty years ago when screwcaps were treated with suspicion in premium Australian reds (and cork taint/oxidation was a huge issue). But these days, it just means I end up with an extra bottle of Yalumba reds.

If they look like this Yalumba Signature Cabernet Shiraz 2019, I’m okay with that.

There’s something wonderfully ageless about Signature. It feels so classically Australian – with acres of very ripe dark fruit, a layer of savoury dark chocolate oak and this plush heartiness to it. It feels like the Barossan epitome

The oak is an important part of that ageless feel, too. Yalumba is the only winery in the southern hemisphere to have its own on-site cooper, and the oak in Signature oak always seems savoury (rather than sweet), and includes Hungarian oak for the fun factor (Hungarian oak has lots of fans for its tight grain FWIW).

Signature is still a wine defined by oak and power. It’s a full-bodied, unsubtle, chunky red that is an ocean away from the modern winemaking fads of nouveau reds made exclusively in tank, Pinot-as-a-way-life and whole bunches as a prerequisite to cool. We’re talking R.M. Willliam wearing dad wine (and proudly so).

The 2019 is a riper, bolder release, too. There’s just a bit more baked chocolate and cooked plums this vintage, and the fruit is blacker than red. That’s not a bad thing, but it feels more blocky and raw rather than exuberant (like, say, the 2016).

But live forever style? Yeah, it has that in droves. It’s not my fave release, but in five years, I know it will be more silken, and in two decades, the year won’t really matter.

I’m glad I got two bottles.

THE VERDICT

• Best drinking: later. 2030 is a good time.
• Score (out of 20): 18
• Score (out of 100): 90
• Alcohol %: 14.5
• RRP (in $AUD): 65
• Winery website: https://www.yalumba.com/
• Would I buy it?: still well worth it.