Cabernet Sauvignon means something different depending on where you’re standing on this estate. Same grape, same mountain, five distinct answers to what it can become, depending on the soil underneath it, what it’s blended with, and how much ambition goes into a given bottle.
Start with the wine built to be opened without much thought. The Tokara Cabernet Sauvignon is fruit-forward and vibrant, the kind of bottle you’d pull for a Tuesday dinner as easily as a table full of friends. Give the story a little more time, though, and it starts to change shape. The Reserve Collection Cabernet Sauvignon asks for patience: layered, more considered, a wine that opens up the longer it sits in the glass rather than all at once. It’s also had a big year for it. The 2022 vintage was named among the red-wine finalists for the Judgement of Davis, marking fifty years since the original Judgement of Paris upended the wine world, and it’s the only South African red selected for this year’s World’s Best Sommeliers’ Selection. Decanter has given it Gold, a lot of attention, fast, for a wine that rewards slowing down.
From there, Cabernet’s influence at Tokara stops being only about wines that carry its name alone. The Director’s Reserve Red isn’t a Cabernet Sauvignon at all. Strictly speaking, it’s a Bordeaux-style blend with Cabernet at its core, the estate’s other varieties brought in to add dimension rather than compete for the lead. It’s the most structured of the five, built to evolve over years rather than reveal itself in one sitting. Pull back to a single hillside and there’s the Simonsberg Cabernet Sauvignon, grown on parcels with a higher share of granite gravel in the soil, which pushes the vines toward smaller berries and more concentrated fruit. It’s made in the smallest quantities of the five, and it shows: power held in check by real elegance, a wine that reads less like an introduction to the variety and more like an argument for this particular hillside.
And then there’s Telos, the most ambitious Cabernet Sauvignon Tokara makes, and in many ways the reason the rest of the range exists at all. The Ferreira family built it on one idea from the outset: a wine drawn only from the very best the estate produces in any given year, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t chase consistency for its own sake, a 2015 doesn’t taste remotely like a 2019, and the drought years show in the glass as clearly as they showed in the vines. Line the vintages up side by side, as we did at our first Telos vertical tasting, and that’s exactly what becomes obvious: five different years, five different wines and the same refusal to compromise running underneath every one of them. If the other four wines answer the question of what this mountain can do with Cabernet, Telos is the answer to what happens when you ask it for nothing but the best.
Website: https://www.tokara.com/