Hoddles Creek is renowned for its Pinot Noir and Chardonnay but the Cabernet is a tidy wine too - if you can find it. It just goes to show you that style can come cheap - or at least that it can be excellent value. This is an elegant Cabernet full of medium bodied blackcurrant, olive and chocolate flavours, the odd 'cabernet signposts' of dried herbs and dust apparent if you look really hard. I admire wines like this. It's the kind of wine I'd like to be... If I were, errr, a wine. Drink 2008-2014. 90 points, Top 100 Wines at $20 or less Campbell Mattinson
It also makes the basic details of exactly how a new world producer goes about it a touch more relevant: Hoddles Creek Estate, or the land for it, has been in the D’Anna family for 40 years. Forty acres of it were planted to vine in 1997, and because the two planted areas are on steep, opposing slopes, all vines are both hand pruned and hand picked – and kept at less than 2.5 tonne to the acre. Cambell Mattinson, Winefront Monthly
