LIRICA is a tiny-production Cabernet Sauvignon from a 54-year-old vineyard in Wilyabrup, shaped by a collaboration between Mr Barval winemaker Rob Gherardi and highly regarded viticulturist Lee Haselgrove.

Dry grown. Old vines. Naturally low yielding. Wild fermented. Unfined and unfiltered. A slightly obsessive level of attention from both vineyard and winery. This is a wine years in the making.

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Finalist in the Young Gun of Wine Top 50 Vineyards of Australia 2026

"This isn’t just any old new release. It’s from a tiny 0.85 hectare, dry-grown vineyard in the heart of Margaret River’s prized Wilyabrup sub-region, on which grows 52-year-old Cabernet vines. The vines were originally grown from cuttings taken from Moss Wood, prior to planting in 1974. The grapes were all hand picked, whole berry sorted, fermented wild, macerated for 33 days and basket pressed. It’s been bottled unfined and unfiltered.

"This is the kind of light, elegant, insistent cabernet that we don’t see enough of. It carries a power of fruit, don’t worry, but it’s modern-grenache-adjacent in that freshness, perfume, insistence and tannin feel of greater importance than mere depth. We see cedarwood oak on this wine, which will settle, but what we mostly see is remarkably pure Cabernet fruit: blackcurrant, iodine, fennel, redcurrant, olives-in-brine, gravel-rolled graphite and a woodsy spice note, the latter almost but not quite into peppercorn territory. What’s of particular note here is the latticework aspect of the tannin. This tannin, perfectly integrated, is sturdy and effortless at once; it’s half-volley-neatly-dispatched-to-the-boundary tannin. This wine tastes as though something special has been added to the Australian wine landscape."

96 Points, Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front