Te Mata Estate
Awatea Cab Merlot 2024 750ml

Bright crimson with a royal purple edge, Awatea ’24 glows in the glass with youthful poise and vitality. The aroma is refined and perfumed, offering blackberry, dark plum, cassis, redcurrant, and dark cherry with layers of thyme, cedar, tapenade and a gentle f loral lift. The palate is generous and seamless, with black plum and blackberry carried by silky, ripe tannins and a savoury umami thread of black truffle, spice and plum sauce. The finish is long, polished and mouth-watering, revealing clarity, balance, and a classical Awatea with depth and graceful evolution ahead.

Awatea ’24 is closed with a Diam cork and will evolve in bottle for at least 10 years from harvest.

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS

pH: 3.60

Total acidity as tartaric: 5.5gpl

Alcohol: 13.5%

Residual Sugar: Dry

VINEYARDS

The grapes for Awatea ’24 were hand harvested from Te Mata Estate’s Hawke’s Bay vineyards between 21 March and 9 April 2024.

WINEMAKING 

The separate parcels of grapes were destemmed before a traditional warm-plunged fermentation and extended maceration on skins. The resulting wines were then run to new and seasoned French oak barrels for 17 months, with 28% being new oak. T hroughout this time, they were regularly topped and racked. The separate wines were blended in November 2024, then returned to barrel for their second winter. T he finished wine was then fined and bottled in November 2025. The final blend is 62% merlot, 27% cabernet sauvignon and 11% cabernet franc.

ORIGIN 

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 troop transport in WWII and was sunk off Algeria in 1942.