Joshua Cooper Old Vine Cuvee Syrah Cabernet 2022

Joshua Cooper Old Vine Cuvee Syrah Cabernet 2022

Described by wine commentator Mike Bennie as "one of Australia’s brightest young winemakers”, Joshua Cooper is steadily forging a reputation for thoughtful, elegant, and confident wines from grapes grown in Macedon and surrounds.

Joshua Cooper has a love of wine history and this new addition, a blend of four distinct vineyards of old-vine cabernet and shiraz, is a tribute to those cuvées from the 1950s and ’60s he so admires. He has also made four single-site wines, but this brings together all the parcels. So, this is the sum of its parts. Deep and intense with an array of complex flavours: satsuma plums, mulberries, Aussie bush/eucalyptus, terracotta, dried herbs and cured meats. It hovers around medium bodied and while it has a core of bright fruit, this is savoury with shapely yet plentiful tannins. It’s stately, it has a presence. The Australian wine scene is all the richer thanks to this young man and his slew of compelling wines. Drink 2025 - 2038. 95 Points Jane Faulkner - Halliday's Australian Wine Companion

The 2022 Old Vine Cuvee I hails from vineyards across Central and Western Victoria, and having just visited these areas in January 2024, I can attest to their evocative, dramatic, almost haunting beauty. On the nose, the wine leads us through thickets of native bush, bay leaf and cassis, bramble and red earth/gravel. In the mouth, the wine is texturally very finely milled, grippy and chewy, and this brings enormous pleasure to this Cabernet lover. This is why we return to Cabernet, for the shape of the tannins. There's a distinct—but subtle—menthol character that laces the edge of the aromas, and I keep coming back to this. Perhaps this is the hook to Australian countryside. $200AUD. 13.5% alcohol, sealed under Diam and wax. Drink 2024 - 2035. 94 Points Erin Larkin - Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

A new super cuvee from Josh Cooper, a star winemaker who has firmly planted his reputation in a relatively short while, but with aplomb. And a focus on cabernet, which for a young fella seems antithetical, but high quality Claret is his guiding light.
This is a blend of four vineyards 45% Greytown, 37.5% Balgownie, 15% Redbank and 2.5% Williams Vineyard. The detail from Josh explains that Greytown is a 1950s co-planted site of shiraz and cabernet from the northeastern side of Heathcote, Balgownie is the prized 1970s block from there which features in another Josh Cooper wine with stunning results. Redbank is the 1970s planted cabernet as nurtured by legendary Stuart Anderson (ex-Balgownie) and Neill Robb, while the dash of Williams Vineyard makes for an interesting inclusion off a site also planted in the 1970s, that ended up in notable wines under the Flynn and Williams brand. The wine spends time in one year old oak of two sizes and styles.
It’s a very elegant, old school-good school feeling wine. I think the first comment, and first reaction, was that toasty, spicy oak is a strong influence in the wine, but not untoward per se, just a bigger player than expected in comparison to other Josh Cooper cabernet releases. It feels a little gritty in a way, good, and the extension of flavour is superb, dark cherry, cassis, violet floral notes with liquorice, dried herbs and faint eucalyptus are in the mix. Fruit tannins are lithe, drawing the wine into a composed, medium weight, flow and pucker. It’s a wine that feels like it perhaps would be best in a year or two, or released as such, to find that immersion of woody spice in a better place, but you can readily appreciate a wine of elegance, grand scent and flavour, and of course promise. It’s pretty darn great. Drink 2025 - 2040+ 94+ Points Mike Bennie - The Wine Front