Mount Mary Vineyard Quintet 2017

The Wine

97 points Gary Walsh – The Wine Front 'It’s 45% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot, 16% Cabernet Franc, 5% Malbec, 4% Petit Verdot. Mount Mary has hit a purple patch with their Quintet over the past few vintages, and their Royal Purpleness continues in 2017. Such perfume. It’s head spinningly fragrant. I’m thinking violet, cigar box, nougat, spicy biscuits, mint, chocolate and sweet wet earth, along with a core of intense raspberry, cherry and blackcurrant. It’s medium bodied, lithe but dense, rich cherry chocolate sprinkled with baking spices, crisp cranberry acidity, high pixel tannin, sweetness of fruit with a savoury ferrous edge. The finish is supremely long, all graphite and perfume, crisp definition and aniseed trailing in the aftertaste. Fine and rare. Drink 2025-2047.

Two things are well known about the Mount Mary Quintet: it ages prodigiously (gracefully, slowly), and it comes wrapped in a light-weight frame. It speaks eloquently of the Yarra Valley and of the varieties from which it is constructed. It is one of the few wines that I collect each year without consideration of vintage conditions. Like every other aspect of this iconic estate, the focus in the vineyards is on the long term, and the sites are being worked with the future very much in mind. The eventual phase-out of herbicides and shift toward organics is being viewed (quite rightly) as a complex, all-encompassing holistic shift. As we all know, it does not happen overnight, but all good things are worth waiting for. Tradition is often responsible for a sense of stoicism, a “slow and steady” approach. This is very much the pace at Mount Mary, and this reviewer could not have been more comforted and thrilled by that. Erin Larkin, Wine Advocate

‘…Quintet, which has always been made with all five Bordeaux varieties. Its finer, perfumed, moderate-alcohol style ages superbly well, especially in top vintages–the 1990 is still in its prime. The other wines are similarly styled and are some of the most age-worthy wines in the Yarra. Tasting a run of Quintet vintages showed that, despite some warmer years, this classically styled blend remains in world-beating form.
Angus Hughson, Vinous