Yalumba premium releases: First taste of Caley, Octavius, Signature

Kevin Glastonbury, the senior red winemaker for Yalumba, Australia’s oldest family-owned winery, founded in 1849, is in London this week for a trio of premium releases.

And while Glastonbury crafts all three of the wines – which Decanter has exclusively tasted ahead of their UK launches – one is particularly personal this vintage.

Scroll down for Decanter‘s exclusive first taste of Yalumba’s The Caley 2018, The Octavius 2018 and The Signature 2019

Released globally on 1 June for AU$365 (£195), and being shown to UK media for the first time on Tuesday 6 June, Glastonbury will present the latest vintage of its elite blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz, The Caley 2018.

Meanwhile, Yalumba’s fifth-generation proprietor Robert Hill-Smith announced last week that The Octavius 2018, the premium old-vine Barossa Shiraz, would debut on La Place de Bordeaux in September. Usually priced around £80 a bottle, its oldest surviving vineyards, from 1844 were planted a year before the 1855 Bordeaux Classification.

Finally, and most personally, The Signature – the flagship Cabernet-Shiraz blend that has honoured Yalumba ‘family members’ on its label since 1962 – is dedicated to Glastonbury in 2019. He shares the accolade alongside former chief viticulturalist Robin Nettelbeck who retired in 2022 after a 45-year career at the winery.

The Signature 2019 – a viti-vini union

This 49th vintage is a fitting tribute to Glastonbury, known as the ‘custodian’ of The Signature, having made the blend since joining Yalumba 24 years ago.

‘I hope my custodianship will be remembered as an era of refinement and great style,’ Glastonbury said. ‘Over the years I have watched Signatories accept their honour, teary and humbled – it puts what I do into perspective.

‘It’s so much more than just a wine,’ he added. ‘To receive this honour makes it worth the effort you put in.’

Glastonbury, known as KG, started at Yalumba 22 years after Nettelbeck, a fourth-generation Barossa grape grower who joined in 1977.

In reflecting on his 45-year tenure, Nettelbeck said his greatest achievement was the initiation, growth and success of the Yalumba Nursery. ‘Through our clonal research and development there has been a seismic shift in grape quality reflected in all our wines.’

Hill-Smith announces the new vintage’s Signatories at Yalumba’s Christmas party. In late November 2022, during a visit to the winery, I was one of the first to taste the newly bottled (but unlabelled) 2019 – well ahead of its Australian release on 14 April and UK launch this week.

Always generous, well-structured and superb value for under £40, The Signature 2019 is a stunner, showing great freshness alongside rich Black Forest gateau-like flavours and supple tannins. A benchmark Aussie red blend, it comprises 52% Barossa Valley Cabernet and Shiraz from both Barossa and Eden Valleys, from vines 45 to 100 years old.

The Caley 2018: the best yet?

Australian wine critics such as Huon Hooke, the joint Regional Chair for Australia at the Decanter World Wine Awards, and David Sly, who writes on South Australia for Decanter, were among the first to taste The Caley 2018 at a preview tasting on 4 April, before its release on 1 June.

Yalumba’s icon wine (AU$365/£195) is only in its sixth vintage and Hooke regards it as the best yet, surpassing – in descending order – the 2015, 2016, 2012, 2014 and 2013.

Only released in exceptional vintages, and with almost two years of bottle age, there was no 2017, and will be no 2020 either, with Glastonbury undecided on the 2021.

He describes the 2018 as a ‘strong, vibrant vintage’ showing ‘beautifully defined aromatics, richness and concentration’.

In Sly’s note on the 2018, he says the highlight of this blend of 80% Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon and 20% Eden Valley Shiraz is its ‘comforting savoury notes that envelop the mid-palate and keep descending through its densely layered structure’.

The Caley is named after Fred Caley Smith, grandson of Yalumba’s founder Samuel Smith. The bottle label of each vintage highlights a leg of a cross-continental research trip he took, the 2018 vintage commemorating his time in Portugal in March 1894.

The Octavius 2018 joins La Place

Announcing the forthcoming September debut of The Octavius 2018 on La Place, Bordeaux’s fine wine marketplace, Hill-Smith said this ‘uniquely Yalumba and uniquely Australian’ old-vine Shiraz represented the best of what the Barossa had to offer.

On tasting the 2018 for Decanter at an exclusive Australian preview tasting in April, Sly found it had ‘dialled down the aggression’ of previous vintages, however still ‘celebrates the muscle of 100-year-old Barossa Shiraz’ just in a more elegant package, helped by cooler, higher-altitude Eden Valley fruit in the blend and less strident oak.

Based on some of Australia’s oldest surviving vineyards, dating to 1854, The Octavius (first made in 1988 with recent vintages releasing at £80) was originally aged in Yalumba-coopered octaves, the small 100-litre barrels imparting a strong oak influence on the wine.

Today the wine matures in new and seasoned barrels of various sizes, from octaves to 300-litre hogsheads, to ensure the old-vine fruit complexity and Barossa terroir shines through.

First taste: Yalumba premium red releases

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