Last year I reviewed one of the best wines I drank that year, a 1991 St Hubert’s Cabernet. I thought I had exhausted my stock of these great old wines when I found, this evening, a 1992 St Hubert’s Cabernet-Merlot nestled away, the sweet thing that it is, in a sinful back alley of my diminuitive cellar where it had the nape of its neck buried deep between magnums of Froggie plonk I had bought for a special occasion but forgotten about.
This St Huberts is a gentle old wine with rich cabernet perfumes but with a gorgeous sweet-muted cabernet palate that still has a steely backbone and plenty of cleansing acid. I remember when I bought this wine thinking it was a bit over-oaked. Not at all – now the oak is obviously there but seamlessly integrated with mature fruit. A great wine is so sweet and drinkable that it doesn’t challenge. Just a good drop and a reminder that the Yarra Valley can produce red wines which age well as well as good pinots and chardonnay for the bourgeois wine-drinking spoilers.
It will drink well for another 4-5 years but has probably reached its peak by now.
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