Whalebone Vineyard Merlot Cabernet Franc 2013

94 points, “It’s both fresh and substantial, oaked but brim-full of fruit. It’s carved with tannin but the momentum of flavours charges through regardless. It tastes of boysenberry and black cherry, blackcurrant, coffee-cream and spearmint. It’s a full-bodied red but it feels alive. Vigorous good health, you might say. Super.” – Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front

The kind of big, ripe wine that credit cards were invented for. Produced from grapes grown on the 39-year-old vines in the Whalebone Vineyard, which was named so because of the discovery of a 35-million-year-old whale skeleton in a limestone cave beneath it.

Matured in French oak for 15 months, Tapanappa Whalebone Vineyard Merlot Cabernet Franc is packed with Christmas pudding flavours from the Merlot and leafy floral notes from the Cabernet Franc. Unfortunately, only 500 dozen were made, and we have very few left.

An Officer of the Order of Australia and a Decanter Man of the Year, Brian Croser is a luminary, a living legend and a true visionary. Rising to fame as the chief winemaker at Hardy’s in the 1970s, he would later establish Petaluma and Argyle in Oregon. But maybe one of his most important wineries is Tapanappa, created in partnership with Bollinger and the Cazes family of Pauillac’s Lynch Bages.