Cabernet Sauvignon is the world’s most-planted red wine grape and the benchmark of structured, age-worthy red wine. It is the grape of the great Médoc estates of Bordeaux, and in Australia it produces two of the country’s most distinctive regional signatures. Its appeal is remarkably consistent across the globe — a recognisable core of cassis, cedar and firm tannin — which is part of why it travelled so well.
An accidental Bordeaux cross
For centuries the grape’s origin was a mystery. DNA typing settled it: in 1997 Bowers and Meredith at UC Davis showed that Cabernet Sauvignon is the offspring of a chance crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc, a spontaneous red-×-white cross that most likely occurred in seventeenth-century Bordeaux. The Cabernet Franc link had long been suspected; the Sauvignon Blanc parent was the genuine surprise — a white grape in the lineage of the world’s most famous red.
Structure and signature
Cabernet is a thick-skinned, small-berried, late-ripening variety, and every part of that description matters. Thick skins and a high pip-to-pulp ratio mean deep colour and high tannin; the firm, phenolically-driven structure is the source of both its youthful austerity and its capacity to age for decades. Its aromatic signature — cassis and blackcurrant fruit, with cedar, graphite and “lead pencil” — is unusually stable across regions.
Being late-ripening, Cabernet’s central risk is failing to reach full ripeness: pick it too early and the unripe skin and seed tannin, together with green methoxypyrazine aromas (capsicum, leaf), dominate. Winning that race is the whole game, and it favours warm sites with a long season but enough coolness — a wide diurnal range — to hold acidity while the tannins mature. Cabernet also has a natural affinity for new oak: the barrel’s cedar and sweet spice frame the cassis fruit rather than fight it, which is why the two are so often paired.
Australia’s two homes
Australia expresses Cabernet through two contrasting regional lenses.
- Coonawarra, on its cigar of terra rossa soil in cool southern South Australia, is the country’s classic Cabernet address — taut, structured wines of cassis and mint with fine, firm tannin, epitomised by Wynns Coonawarra Estate.
- Margaret River, a maritime region on the far south-west coast pioneered from the late 1960s by estates such as Vasse Felix and Cullen, gives a rounder, gravelly-loam style — ripe cassis with supple but serious structure, often the closest Australia comes to the Médoc.
Both are cool-influenced sites, and both make wines built to reward the cellar — the reason Cabernet, more than almost any variety, rewards patience.