Penfolds

Quantum Bin 98 Cabernet Sauvignon

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  Vintage 2018
  97 points Halliday Wine Companion

It’s a voluptuous red wine, drenched in coffee-cream oak, bursting with blackcurrant and blueberry, highlighted by eucalypt and graphite. There’s a drumroll of tannin from the mid-palate on; it has a growl to it, a grain, and this seems to bring more flavour out, as if the fruit has become embedded in the tannin like a song in a groove. This is a rich, produced, all-encompassing red. It has density, it has soar; if it shook your hand it would crush it. Because the flush of tannin is so significant this wine won’t start to peak for another ten years, and will take 15-20 to really be at its best. It’s easy to view this heavy-set, oak-washed style of wine as somewhat anachronistic and yet, ironically, the future is its oyster. Indeed, in summary, it’s magnificent.

• 

  Vintage 2018
  97 points Wine Advocate MW

The first release of this new iconoclastic label, the 2018 Quantum Bin 98 is labeled as a "Wine of the World," although the AVA is the United States and technically 87% is American wine (Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley), while 13% is Australian ("Grade A1" Shiraz from South Australia). The wine spent 16 months in oak, 100% new, 80% American oak and 20% French. In fact, the wine is made very much like Grange, in that it completes fermentation in new, mainly American oak barrels.