2013 Yalumba The Caley Cabernet & Shiraz Museum Release

98 POINTS

Dave Brookes - Halliday Wine Companion

55/45% Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon/Barossa shiraz; this is a museum release of the Yalumba icon cabernet shiraz blend. Lovingly cellared in the marble cellars below the winery, it's made by Kevin Glastonbury and it is in a very fine place. It was a low yielding year with tiny berries; concentrated from the get-go. There's still a youthful sheen to its colour, with plush berry fruits, brown spice, licorice, dark chocolate, cedar, tobacco and a little leather. It's wonderfully harmonious, with a elegant flow of fruit, a tight, fine tannin array and a real sense of focus and precision to its passing. A very fine place indeed.

97 POINTS

Campbell Mattinson - Halliday Wine Companion

Stained/spongy cork. A beautiful wine in all respects, its heart soft and generous, its head stern and serious, the combination as complete as it is complex. It tastes of an assortment of red and black berries, tobacco and cloves, with tremendously well integrated smoky oak and plenty of tang, tannin, flavour and run through the finish. An exhibition in both power and elegance. Cork permitting, it will mature gloriously.

95 POINTS

Mike Bennie - The Wine Front

Different fruit sources to the 2012, with 55% Coonawarra cabernet and 45% Barossa shiraz in the mix. The cabernet is from the Yalumba Menzies vineyard from a single block, and the shiraz is two vineyards, “distinguished for age, precision of fruit flavours”, says winemaker Kevin Glastonbury. “For this wine I don’t look to grapes or vineyards that produce overt flavours in shiraz, more light, shade and freshness is inherent”, Glastonbury qualifies. All the hooting and hollering around the 2012 has died down, with the wine is now having to stand on its own too feet. I like the idea that the old, family-owned company has a wine that sits at $350, they’ve earned it well and truly. Great old vineyards, high quality winemaking, history, culture, longevity. It’s time, or overdue. So much going on here, a wine definitively in the zone of ‘complex’ but also ‘seamless’ and quietly ‘powerful’ and for sure ‘long, regal, refined’, and if you like bold, powerful red wines that hold tight and true, then you’re in the zone of a ‘serious’ wine. The flavour rolls distinctly and densely across the palate but feels lifted and tightened with chew of ropes of tannin. Freshness is inherent too. All dark fruits, tobacco, earth, clove and cedar – a seamless mesh. It’s a very, very good wine for its ilk and an emphatic statement about Yalumba, on many levels.

95 POINTS

Josh Raynolds - Vinous

Saturated ruby. Displays powerful, smoke- and spice-accented aromas of ripe dark fruits, licorice, vanilla and potpourri. Sweet and expansive in the mouth, offering lush boysenberry, cassis, spicecake and floral pastille flavors plus suggestions of mocha and cola. The floral note echoes strongly on an extremely long, sweet finish that's framed by harmonious tannins.

95 POINTS

Joe Czerwinski - Robert Parker Wine Advocate

A blend of 55% Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon and 45% Barossa Valley Shiraz, Yalumba's 2013 The Caley is only the second vintage to be released. Aged in 40% new French oak, it features fine, aristocratic aromas of pencil shavings, mint and dark fruit. Cassis, baking spices and hints of meat and mint come forth on the palate. It's medium to full-bodied, with rich, velvety tannins that remain firm and lasting on the finish. I tasted this from a bottle that had been decanted the previous night, so you'll want to give it plenty of air, or ideally, just cellar it for another five years before broaching a bottle.