Steenberg Merlot 2010

I'm approaching the stage in my personal wine education where I'm going to start blind tasting. I think I can say with complete confidence that I would have got this wine 100% wrong in a blind tasting. I don't know what Steenberg's secret is, but they've managed to make the gentle and unassuming Merlot grape produce a more Cabernet Sauvignon / Shiraz like wine - big full bodied and absolutely delicious.

The wine is dark red with just a hint of a tawny rim and it coats the glass nicely hinting at a high alcohol content (14%). The nose brings an initial waft of savouriness followed quickly by deep and juicy red fruits with just a subtle hint of vanilla.

I couldn't wait to taste the wine and it lived up to its promise with a lovely mouth filling flavour a perfect melange of the savouriness and the fruits that I picked up on the nose, a nice almost chewy complexity and just the tiniest hit of tannins on the finish. Due to a miscalculation on Russell's part I got a full 75cl bottle to taste, but this wine was so good that the entire bottle only lasted a little longer than the "one gulp" 12.5cl samples we normally get to taste.  A new personal favourite.

Clive Holroyd
Database Manager