2024 Kalleske Merchant Cabernet Sauvignon, Barossa Valley

The 2024 Merchant opens with cassis, black berries and violets, with complex notes of nori, tapenade and cedar emerging with light movement of the glass. Medium-weighted, the dense varietal fruit is wrapped in fine, dusty natural tannins. Lightly spiced with barrel notes, the palate is poised, long and persistent.

A classy warm climate Cabernet that will keep well for a decade. Give the wine a good swirl in a decanter if patience is not your virtue, and enjoy over a nice weekend dinner.

Try with Cantonese beef short ribs braised with black beans, star anise, and aged soy sauce, or a Mexican Birria de Res.

More about this wine

Kym John Kalleske is a seventh generations Kalleske hay miller and a merchant of chaff, lamb and grapes. He is also hands-prunes and harvests the single vineyard of old Cabernet vines growing in shallow, red brown soil over deep clays that produces fruit for this wine.

The grapes from the excellent, dry and warm 2024 season were picked in two lots at the start of April, destemmed into open-top fermenters, and fermented on skins for seven and third days, respectively, with hand pump-overs twice a day. The pressed wine underwent malolactic and was matured for 16 months in French oak hogsheads, of which a quarter were new.

The final blended wine is vegan friendly.

About Kalleske

Johann Georg Kalleske and his family arrived in South Australia from Prussia in 1838. Settling at Greenock in the North-Western Barossa in 1853, the first vines were planted on the family’s Moppa property in 1875. 

Today, the now certified organic and biodynamic property continues to be a diverse and thriving mix of vineyards, sheep, cattle, chaff mill and winery, with all aspects managed by the family. The previously sold grapes have been bottled under the family name since 2002, with an increasingly diverse offer from Troy Kalleske drawing on the rich material available from the 48-hectare vineyards.