Forester Estate

Margaret River Premium Cabernet Sauvignon 2024

Grape variety - 97% Cabernet Sauvignon, 2% Cabernet Franc, 1% Petit Verdot.
Oak maturation - 14 months - 28% new, 72% two and three year old French oak barriques.
Colour - Deep red with purple hue.
Aroma - Lifted with fresh characters of cassis, mulberry, bay leaf and lavender along with gravel dust and balanced cedar oak.
Palate - Long with a tight and focused drive, fine chalky tannins and balanced acidity. There’s cassis, mulberry, bay leaf and sage with a subtle lavender perfume and balanced cedar oak. A restrained wine from a ripe and powerful year.
Food matches - Traditional roast lamb with rosemary.
Peak drinking - Drinking well now but will develop further in the bottle through until 2034. The wine will benefit from decanting before drinking.
Viticulture - Picked from a selection of super premium cabernet vineyards at our disposal. As always, meticulous management of bud numbers and shoot thinning ensure a balanced canopy to ripen the crop. The vines grow in the well regarded gravelly or granite soils of Northern Margaret River and are allowed to reach full ripeness before harvesting. The 2024 growing season was warm and dry which led to an early harvest. Our best Cabernet blocks were harvested between the 23rd of February and the 14th of March.
Winemaking - The fruit was harvested in the morning, delivered to the winery and was processed straight away on receival. Fermentation was controlled at 25-29 degrees Celsius in our small open fermenters with heading down boards. Extraction was achieved by daily draining of the wine away from the skins and returning back over the top, with fermentation and maceration times varying from 5 to 25 days. The wine was then pressed to a blend of new and older French oak barriques to complete malo - lactic fermentation.
Storage and Bottling - Maturation lasted 14 months before the wine was bottled in July 2025. Bottled under screw cap to ensure the wine retains its varietal and regional integrity for longer.