Wine & Spirits - February 2018 - 31

The vineyards at Moss Wood in Wilyabrup,
2.5 miles from the Indian Ocean.

some of the wind stress on those vines. "Now that the
trees provide some protection, we are getting better
ripeness and softer tannins," Clare said.
Back in his aging cellar, Mugford filled a glass from
one barrel, the fruit of the short rows at the top of
the hill, part of the 1971 planting at Moss Wood,
then another from the long rows down the hill, the
1970 planting; the Pannells propagated those vines
from the "super selection" of cabernet that Dorham
Mann had developed, narrowing his father's original
selection of 29 vines down to five. The wine from the
short rows tasted meaty and sweet, with long, graceful tannins. The cabernet from down the hill gave
more cassis-driven fruit. And a blend from the "old
block," the original planting (including Jack Mann's
selection and Dorham's super selection), was rich and
spicy, with more openness to the tannins and beautiful red-berry fruitiness.
I was thinking about these young wines the next
day, at a retrospective tasting of Margaret River cabernet hosted at Vasse Felix. Moss Wood showed the
2005, a cabernet just hitting its stride. The ripe currant tones apparent in the barrel samples had gained
resonance, while the wine still carried the energy and
freshness of fruit grown on the Margaret River coast,
the warm-cool of the sand and the surf, red spice and
black fruit, complete and delicate.
SEVERAL MILES TO THE SOUTH, VANYA CULLEN FARMS
THE VINES HER PARENTS PLANTED IN 1971. They had
started with a gravelly rise above Caves Road; according to Forrestal and Jordan's book, it was a parcel Bill
Jamieson had suggested Cullity purchase when he

was initially looking for a site, but Cullity declined.
The Cullens have since expanded to parcels on both
sides of Caves Road. Vanya, the youngest of Kevin
and Diana Cullen's six children, grew up on the ranch
where her mother made the wine; she took over winemaking in 1989 and later worked with Diana to convert the land to organic farming (Cullen gained biodynamic certification in 2004).
I met with Cullen's viticulturist, Matt Dermody,
one spring morning in November, walking the gentle
slope where the family had planted cabernet sauvignon in 1971. The vine rows were spread wide for the
tractors of that time, and the space between the rows
was covered in grasses and flowers. I pointed to one
that I'd seen blooming in other places as well and
Dermody let out a quiet groan. "Capeweed," he said,
a pest, though not as big a pest as kikuyu, an invasive
grass, native to East Africa, with roots that mat and
suck water away from the vines. Though Dermody
and Cullen don't like to cultivate the soil-they find
it can lead to compaction, crushing the soil structure
and creating challenges for the creatures they want
to shelter there, everything from earthworms to the
microbes that help sustain their vines-he makes
an exception for kikuyu, using the spinning tines of
a power harrow to rip its shallow root systems like
forks gathering spaghetti.
The cabernet vines at the top of the hill, coming
into the peak of flowering, looked absurdly healthy.
When I commented on the intensity of the green of
their leaves, Dermody held a leaf and snapped his
index finger at the center of it. "We call it the flick
test," he explained. "If it tears, it's diseased. But if
WINE & SPIRITS

FEBRUARY 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - February 2018