Cobaw Ridge Syrah 2025
CM wrote about a Cobaw Ridge wine, some fourteen years ago, this: Organically-grown pinot noir from Macedon. Neither fined nor filtered. “Minimal sulphites the only addition.” I don’t always love the wines but Cobaw Ridge is a fascinating producer; always pushing the limits and doing things its own way. Feels natural too. Just has that extra verve. That extra spring to its step. I’m neither a fan nor a flogger of the “natural” wine movement but the wines do feel different on your tongue.
This still rings true. But to carbon date things, there was a time in my in distant, fine wine merchant life, Best Cellars if you will, where Cobaw was revered and left one head scratching in equal measure. At the time, some of the anomalies and kinks of the wines were yet to be ironed out, yet to find the groove, and yet always there was ‘an extra spring to its step’ and the wines did ‘feel different on your tongue’. In those days the lexicon around the wines was stricter, less accepting of the x-factor and wilder edges, and some of Cobaw Ridge’s wines went there, and some were just true expressions of a cool place in cool years and the oak wasn’t huge and nor was the flavour and be damned. I missed a few tricks back then.
Things have changed, times have changed, and there’s no questioning that Cobaw has found some next level flex. Finesse, purity, sublime balance. Older vines? The real-deal kick in of BD and organics now? A shift in flavour from global warming giving more to a wine and pushing back on the colder place, the harder to ripen place that the wines came from a decade plus ago? Dunno. But sheesh, it’s been a building thing and a gradual stretch into a new era.
Szechuan pepper, game meat, green peppercorn, ripe blackberries on brambles, fennel. Scents and flavours align on this. An inky feel to the wine but it glides and glides, then snarls with grip and pumice stone dryness. It’s heady in scent too. A fog of the stuff, evocative and a little wild and animale but fresh in the same sniff. Savoury red wine, medium weight, plush and then finding grip. An experience here, a true and distinct personality, A wine of striking originality. 95 Points, Drink : 2026 - 2035+, WineFront