It's a very savoury (a word that comes to mind with increasing frequency these days) style, and extremely food-friendly wine that went really well with the long-simmered sugo alla bolognese. By comparison with the Three Little Pigs, the label on The Cover Drive Cabernet Sauvignon is a tad on the austere side, a cigarette card-sized graphic on the front, a briefly descriptive label on the back, but it's what's inside the bottle that matters.
In that regard the 2007 Cover Drive goes straight along the deck to the boundary in a most impressive fashion. Like the shot, Coonawarra Cabernet is a wine style that brings a round of polite applause from the aficionado and this one is a classy number, a little on the young side, perhaps, but there's plenty to like both on the nose and over the palate. There's a mix of notes in the bouquet, and once it hits the palate you're into nicely structured tannins with a lengthy follow through. Having matched it with a lamb casserole I continued to savour the remainder of the bottle watching a predictably bloodthirsty documentary about medieval Scots history, and a spell contemplating various historical issues after it finished. It's the sort of wine that lends itself to such pursuits.
Having recently finished the last of my 2004 The Lodge Hill Shiraz it's no wonder I left the 2007 version till the end of the process of working my way through the drink reasonably soon styles in the order. After all, I had a fair idea what lay in store.
Deeply purple-red in the glass with fruit and spice notes on the nose, the 2007's a very drinkable style with rounded tannins and a lingering finish that runs right through to the end, which is more than I could say for the rain-shortened Twenty20 game I watched as the bottle level fell steadily.
So, looking back over the order, with the cellaring prospects (the two Floritas, The First XI and The McRae Wood) safely consigned to the Wine Fridge, what have we learned?
For a start, based on tasting these, you could quite safely order any of these mid-range wines and be guaranteed of getting a good wine. James Halliday rates them between 89 and the low nineties, which ain't too shabby at all.
However, given other factors involved (North Queensland summer, the need to run down stocks in case we're away later in the hot rainy season, and the number of wineries I need to sample are three of the most obvious ones) it'll be a while before I'll placing an order, and when that happens it'll more than likely be the result of an email announcing a clearance sale.
An alternative scenario, involving Hughesy's membership of The Wine Society could well kick in around the end of the financial year. Given the scheduled arrival of five cases of wine through the year and a need to reorder to reach a designated target to maintain freight-free status that's an issue that may well be reviewed in the not-too-distant future.
The rich, full-bodied 92-Halliday-points The Lodge Hill makes a pretty strong argument for doing that, and the fact that its siblings aren't far behind adds further fuel to the fire.
