Wakefield The Visionary Cabernet Sauvignon, Clare Valley

Description

Wakefield The Visionary Cabernet Sauvignon, alongside the Wakefield Pioneer Shiraz, forms the pair of wines that make up Wakefield’s flagship wines. It is a superb Clare Valley Cabernet Sauvignon named in honour of Bill Taylor Senior, Wakefield’s founder and visionary.

Wakefield Wines is located in the heart of the Clare Valley. The company was founded by wine merchant Bill Taylor Senior in 1969 with the purchase of 178 hectares of vineyards near the Wakefield River in Auburn. Bill Taylor carefully chose the site for its red brown loam over limestone soils ( this is known as “terra rossa”) and the cool climate of the Clare valley. In that same year, 1969, the first Cabernet Sauvignon vines were planted. Since 2000 the company has been run by Managing Director and third generation Winemaker Mitchell Taylor, the grandson of Bill Taylor Senior.

Today Wakefield Estate is one of the most highly esteemed cool climate producers in Australia. Almost all of the grapes are sourced from 500 hectares of family-owned vineyards in the winery which makes it one of the largest single estate plantings in Australia. They do source some fruit from trusted growers in other regions, Coonawarra, for example. The family’s home estate and vineyards are situated in South Australia’s beautiful Clare Valley, in the sub-region of Auburn and stretch to another sub-region border, Watervale. As well as the estate range, they also produce the Jaraman and St Andrew’s ranges. 

The grapes for Wakefield The Visionary Cabernet Sauvignon come from a series of exceptional vineyard blocks (A60, A10 and A70) which form part of their St Andrew’s vineyard and some old vine fruit from the Wakefield block on the Auburn estate. The grapes are destemmed and the parcels are vinified separately in potter fermenters. Post MLF, the wine was transferred to a selection of fine-grained French oak barrels – 50 % in new oak and the balance in a selection of two and three year old barrels, specifically selected for cedar, tobacco and spice characters. After 12 months a painstaking barrel selection assessment was undertaken to identify those parcels deemed as ‘exceptional’ and these were returned to barrel for a further 12 months maturation prior to bottling in August 2018.

Wakefield The Visionary Cabernet Sauvignon is only made in very small quantities in exceptional vintages and is labelled as an “exceptional parcel release”.