Cabernet Sauvignon

The grape itself is an accident. DNA work at UC Davis in 1996 revealed Cabernet Sauvignon to be a chance crossing of Cabernet Franc and — improbably — Sauvignon Blanc, somewhere in seventeenth-century Bordeaux. A red grape with a white parent: the small, thick-skinned, seed-heavy berries it inherited are why the wine is so dark, so tannic, and so capable of outliving the people who made it.

Its Australian chapter begins with the early colonial collections, but the Coonawarra chapter starts in 1890, when the Scottish pastoralist John Riddoch subdivided his land at Penola into a fruit colony and planted vines on the red ground. The venture nearly died with him; for half a century the region survived on brandy and bulk wine, its Cabernet unfashionable and its distance from everywhere unforgiven. The rediscovery came in the 1950s and 60s, when winemakers realised the cool, flat, red-dirt paddocks had been quietly making claret-weight wine all along.

The recipe has three parts. The terra rossa itself — iron-stained, free-draining, friable — is only about half a metre deep: enough to feed a vine, not enough to spoil it. Beneath it lies a hard calcrete crust that roots must crack through, a struggle that keeps vigour in check. And under that, metres of soft marine limestone — an old seabed — holding a shallow, pure water table the roots can reach in a dry summer.

Restraint above, insurance below. The vine is never drowned and never desperate, and Cabernet — a grape that sulks when overwatered and toughens when stressed — finds the exact middle it likes. Add a climate cooler than the Barossa (the Southern Ocean is just over the horizon) and ripening stretches long and slow, which is where the fine tannin and the bay-leaf perfume come from.

The same limestone country runs north through Wrattonbully and Padthaway— Coonawarra’s quieter siblings, where the dirt is closely related and the cellar doors are blissfully uncrowded.

Two thousand seven hundred kilometres west, Margaret River makes the other great Australian Cabernet — and the argument between them is the best rivalry in Australian wine. Margaret River’s gravelly loams and Indian Ocean air give a wine less about blackcurrant and more about dark cherry and graphite, with a fragrant, almost Bordeaux polish. Coonawarra answers with structure and that unmistakable mint.

For a cooler, leafier take, the Yarra Valley’s Cabernet is the historic sleeper — it was the backbone of the valley’s nineteenth-century fame. Taste all three in a season and you’ll never need the word “terroir” explained again.