I think it can be sort of useless to give you a score from barrel, especially when, as in this case, the wine still has a further 12 months to go in barrel prior to blending and bottling. Nevertheless, I was curious to taste this wine and see how this beautiful, mild, long season played out in "bottle." All signs pointed toward the most superb set of circumstances in regard to the 2022/2023 season, until rain set in at the end of the growing season that caused some challenges for viticulturists and winemakers. Notwithstanding, the year has produced a wine of dark berry countenance and tannic amplitude—the fruit and the tannins feel pulverized together. Seamless. Inchoate as it is, I feel it signals great things for this wine. I'm looking forward to its release in 2026 or 2027.

The 2021 Art Series Cabernet Sauvignon will be released in the winter of 2024, and it's an interesting timeline, given the 2020 will be released this February. The 2021 season in Margaret River was frequently wet, and as a result, the character of the red wines is lighter in body and fruit weight. This 2021 wine is lighter in the glass than the 2020 (no surprise, given berry sizes in general in 2020), and the nose introduces dried herbs and exotic spice, alongside the raspberry, cassis and nori. Block 8 and block 9, which make up the backbone of this wine, are dry-grown, and this is an important point in the years that are markedly wet (2021, 2006) and dry (2024, 2022, 2020, etc.). On the palate, the wine is perfumed and fine, lightweight and flowing. It's a beautiful wine to drink now, thanks to its powdery tannins. It's all about the tannins here; it's whippy, like fresh new growth on a plant. I would drink this anytime from release; it offers tremendous pleasure just as it is. Sealed under screw cap.

The 2020 vintage is rolling out now (as of January 2024). The season was warm, dry and early and marred by low yields across the state due to weather during flowering in the spring of 2019. Obviously, we all recall the events of March 2020: in Perth, the first COVID-19 lockdowns occurred in late March. Yet the wines from that season have proven to be superb—a testament to the grit and necessity of getting wines made no matter the conditions. The 2020 Art Series Cabernet Sauvignon is sweetly fruited, with a cavalcade of dark berry fruits and very fine, graphite tannins. I see this wine yearly in a blind tasting of same-vintage Cabernet Sauvignons from around the globe, and it routinely performs extraordinarily well; yet I feel its reputation has yet to catch up with the quality. For the first time, the wine has cracked $100 AUD retail, which pulls it more into line with the rest of the pricing in the region. It has excellent structure, sweet fruit, medium body and succulent acidity. Sealed under screw cap.

The 2019 Art Series Cabernet Sauvignon is a child of the season that birthed it. Cooler than both of the great vintages immediately on either side, it shows its mineral, graphite core aromatically. On the palate, the wine shows precision and detail and all manner of things gray/dark brown: star anise, fennel seeds, a hint of arnica, tobacco and bay leaf, cassis and ozone. It's a super, medium-weight wine with gravelly/ductile tannins that splay across the finish. The 2019 vintage is proving its supporters correct in the declaration of its high quality, both as a standalone season and in comparison to the previous and excellent 2018 season. It offers us, the drinkers, a stylistic choice—and it's a win-win situation. Sealed under screw cap.