Strange Bru
Red
Ruby Cabernet is a hybrid of Cabernet Sauvignon and Carignan designed in the 1940's to combine Cabernet characteristics with Carignan productivity and drought resistant qualities. It's simple, honest, bright, vibrant and a youthful wine.
South Africa
Food Match
Beef carpaccio, sticky Chinese pork ribs, sweet pink lamb, chicken-heart hotpot or venison.
Tasting Notes
Ruby Cabernets parentage comes through in it's leafy Cabernet Sauvignon nose, but the palate is driven by an earthier relative – Carignan. This is a mouthful of crushed rubies, at once dark and glittering with cassis and minerals. The finish is powerful, savory and darkly rich.
Production
Ruby Cabernet is the child of industry, a blue-collar cultivar hybridized from Carignan and Cabernet Sauvignon at California's UC Davis, to give a drought-resistant variety of color for the dry Central Valleys. An immediate ping on South Africa's co-operative radar, therefore, where for thirty years or more it has been farmed somewhat obsessively for color and structure. Well sometimes even the village idiot makes it to the University and in 2018 this long-established block shone above all others and we choose to bottle a small volume on it's own. Un-oaked, untrammeled and unedited this is the backing singer of many a blend but solo.