2012 Wynns Coonawarra Estate Cabernet Shiraz Merlot

Community Tasting Notes (10) Avg Score: 89.7 points

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  11/13/2023 - mjwstickings Likes this wine: 91 Points

  My second bottle of this wine, tasted in early 2023. Certainly past its peak but still holding up remarkably well at over a decade old. It's noticeably softer than the first bottle I tasted back in 2016, with the fruit moving into the dried end of the spectrum and the minerality somewhat more muted, but while it may have lost a point my review from then still mostly applies:
  
  This may be an odd way to put it, but this amazing CSM blend smells and tastes like blood -- and I mean that in the best possible way. It's as if Wynns, a great producer, has somehow tapped into the veins running deep beneath Coonawarra, pulling up the essence of the earth into its grapes. And it's like blood because of all the iron, a strong, absorbing metallic note that I usually identify with southern Italian reds. Here, it defines the wine but does not overwhelm it. It is, in this way, the primary vein that runs through what is otherwise an enormously complex wine, with softer Merlot notes of raspberry, plum, cherry, and chocolate coming first but then complemented by Cab cassis and Shiraz/Syrah black pepper and meat, with additional earthy notes connected back to the iron, the combination continuing to evolve, and deepen, with time in the open. All three varietals shine brightly, and there is certainly the tannic structure and (cran-cherry) acidity for further aging to bring the various elements into even greater harmony. With such glorious aromatics, flavour complexity, and texture, I like this even more than Wynns's Black Label Cab, of which I recently tasted the 2013. The Cab was still somewhat closed, and may ultimately have more upside, but the CSM is simply fantastic as an expression of this trinity of well-known but not often blended grapes and of the land from which they come. And that iron, the blood of the earth, is simply extraordinary.

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  1/7/2023 - @MelFridges Likes this wine:

  Great wine for aging 5-7 years

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  4/10/2021 - StewartWent wrote: 87 Points

  Hard to be too critical given age and it's price on release ($12?). Fruits are a little porty with some thickness, tar and grain. Astringent late. Probably seen better days but always great fun drinking cheapies with proper bottle age.

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  3/28/2020 - AlanW wrote:

  Ok

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  11/29/2018 - DonHyatt Likes this wine: 95 Points

  Excellent. Rich, balanced, smooth. Plum.

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