Te Mata 'Awatea' Showcase Cabernet-Merlot 23 750ml

With a gleaming crimson core and ruby rim, Awatea Cabernets/Merlot ’23 is enticingly perfumed with blackberry, bay, violets, and vanilla. The satisfying palate is detailed, poised and texturally rewarding, interplaying plum, black olive and sandalwood notes with salinity, refreshing acidity and bright tannin length. It has a captivating elegance that is classically Te Mata.

• Awatea Cabernets/Merlot ’23 is closed with a Diam cork, allowing continued evolution in bottle for 10 years from harvest.
• The grapes for Awatea Cabernets/Merlot ’23 were hand harvested from Te Mata Estate’s Hawke’s Bay vineyards
• 96 Points "It is a magnificent wine and a tremendous value", Erin Larkin, The Wine Advocate
• 94 Points "It has perfume and presence … lovely wine to drink", Gary Walsh, The Wine Front

Awatea takes its name from the historic ship SS Awatea (a Maori word meaning “Eye of the Dawn”) that sailed the Auckland – Sydney – Wellington route in the late 1930s. The Awatea was requisitioned as a troop transport in WWII and was sunk off Algeria in 1942.