2017 Mitchell Sevenhill Cabernet Sauvignon

94 POINTS

Mike Bennie - The Wine Front

Picked on flavour from an unirrigated estate vineyard. The great thing about most of Mitchell’s cabernet, unlike most of Clare cabernet, is it packs flavour in at lower alcohol and shows more ‘Classic Cabernet’ characters. Marvellous red. Silky, medium weight, so beautifully perfumed with floral lift, red and black berry fruit, alpine herbs and faint eucalyptus, with the message on approach being purity of fruit over edifice. Tense and exceptionally long, fine boned, fresh-feeling with all the blue berry fruit dotted with white pepper, faint clove, thyme/sage and gentle earthiness. So succulent, tannins fine as can be, tight, long, stretching the wine into the distance. Revelation stuff. What a thing; proper stuff.

93 POINTS

Ken Gargett - WinePilot.com

The team at Mitchell’s like to think of this Cab, from their Sevenhill Vineyard, as an old fashioned, popular Claret style and there is something to that. Kudos to them for holding the wine back for a few years, as they do with others, before release and yet keeping prices so low. The wine sees extended maceration on skins for 40 days and is then aged in small French oak barrels for two years. It is bottled without filtration. The wine offers a deep red colour with a slight brown on the rim. Beautifully aromatic, the nose offers a pleasing mix of strawberry, black cherry and blackcurrant notes with the latter proving the more dominant. Very well integrated oak with chocolate and fig hints. A mid-weight, rather elegant style which lets its flavours do the talking. Certainly not a brash, in-your-face red like so many we see. Attractive length with fine, slightly furry tannins. Quite delicious.

93 POINTS

Erin Larkin - Halliday's Wine Companion

The release window is just about correct here: at 5 years old it has softened considerably from the early, frisky, vivacity that cabernet exudes, and all things have melted into one. The spice, the fruit, the acid and the oak are seamlessly joined, making it difficult to seperate or tease apart. Elegant, mid weight and generally lovely. It has an heirloom tomato/claret aspect which is most appealing.

92 POINTS

Angus Hughson - Winepilot.com

You’d call this a traditional Australian Dry Red, and it’s becoming an endangered species. It is not a modern blockbuster or jumps up and says look at me. Rather, it’s made to reveal itself over a meal, or an hour or two, as it slowly gives up its layers of complex fruit. Only medium in colour but shows a strong cabernet signature with leafy cassis now joined by aged truffle notes with cedary oak rounding out the package. There is an almost Bordeaux-like elegance to the dry and fleshy palate with acidity standing up to its layers of red and dark berry fruits before earthy notes and herbal oak come through right on the finish. Tannins are integrated and provide a supple backbone suggesting this delicious wine is close to its peak. Match it with roast lamb topped only with rosemary – perfection.