Josh Cooper Balgownie Old Vine Cabernet 2025
The 2025 growing season delivered another outstanding vintage in our region. A warm, settled spring and summer were balanced by cool evenings and an extended ripening period, allowing the fruit to reach full physiological maturity without excessive sugar accumulation. Consistently dry conditions throughout the season meant disease pressure was virtually non-existent, resulting in pristine fruit arriving at the winery.
Balgownie Vineyard is a name that should need no introduction to lovers of Victorian wine. An icon of the 70s and 80s, it has produced some of the most remarkable mature Australian wines I have had the pleasure of drinking. Indeed my cellar is well stocked with them thanks to 10+ years of collecting.
Established 1969 200m asl near the banks of Myers Creek in Maiden Gully on Ordovician shale, quartz and ironstone rubble, thanks to current winemaker Tony Winspear it now supplies me a small amount of old vine Cabernet Sauvignon from some of the earliest plantings from 1970.
The most refined of the Cabernet cuvées, but also the most concentrated and finally balanced. The best vintage yet for us from this wonderful site and vintage and a wine that displays my most prized characteristics - effortless complexity and power without weight.
Please decant well prior to drinking, or cellar for as long as you like. A high note to go out on.
Roast Lamb Shoulder or Roast Beef with jus.
A wine which immediately makes one sit up and focus. An extra layer of depth and structure this year, yet still refined and complex with graphite, sweet cassis, cedar spice, violet and rose, air reveals infinite nuance and detail and a briny, nori like complexity.
The palate is flooded with fine emery tannins and wave upon wave of dark Cabernet fruit, finishing with coal, sweet violet and cassis, and a wave of perfume.
