No matter what you’ve been led to expect, nothing quite prepares you for that sharp intake of breath when you first set eyes on Rob and Gen Mann’s Calgardup Vineyard. Turning off the road into the bushland and churning the red dirt beneath your tyres, you barely have an inkling. And then you see it, an oasis of closely planted, pristinely presented, organically farmed vines enclosed by towering marri trees. Audible beyond is the call of the ocean, which has such a strong say in this site’s success.
The unimaginable transition between the main road and vineyard occurs within the space of a couple of hundred metres. The path Rob and Gen travelled to get here was infinitely longer. You might think that the example of Rob’s legendary grandfather, Jack, gave him a shortcut, or the fact he and Gen were precocious talents and bloody hard workers from the off might have shortened the route, or that they had it all cracked when Rob was headhunted by Cape Mentelle and Gen was snapped up by Howard Park in the mid-2000s.
This might be the case if Rob and Gen were growing good wine from a good site. But this vision was and is much, much bigger than that.
It turns out Rob didn’t share the common conception that his initial stint in Margaret River was an unqualified success. “I’d probably been a frustrated Cabernet maker at Cape Mentelle, never quite being able to nail what I was looking for,” he told the Vininspo! podcast. “In ’14, I was the closest I’d come, and then the tap on the shoulder; it was like, ‘Hey, we’d like you to go to Newton (Vineyard).’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I finally made the wine I wanted to make, and now I’m off.’ So, in that sense, it took nine years at Cape Mentelle to try and make one good Cabernet. Or what I thought was a really great Cabernet.”
An exceptional release that speaks fluently of vineyard and place, while providing immense satisfaction in the high-quality stakes division.
96 points. Mike Bennie, Halliday Wine Companion
Returning from Napa to Western Australia, Rob was armed with the Cape Mentelle learning curve and the Newton experience. But he had more than that up his sleeve, having scouted out prospective sites from his early days in the region. “I basically spent every weekend driving around Margaret River, looking at the soil maps, looking at the climate maps, looking at the 50-year climatic forecasts, the predictions about climate change, et cetera, and identified some really specific areas in Margaret River where I thought I could plant a vineyard and make great Cabernet. So that took about 15 years of searching.”
The search was worth it; the site is so special, and the Manns knew precisely the style of wine they were after.
“This is uber maritime—it’s basically as close as you can get to you know having your toes in the water growing grapes,” says Rob of the site. “Being close to the ocean, particularly this close, gives you a really strong buffering effect from particularly those warm days. That’s when you can do damage to the high notes of Cabernet. It can make the tannins quite aggressive and tough due to overexposure. So, we’re looking for something that’s really quite seamless, elegant, characterful, distinctive.”
This 2024 from Rob and Gen is liquid proof that their quest was an unqualified success—and that they still set their sights higher than almost anyone else in the game.