TELOS VINTAGE TASTING AUGUST 2026
Earlier this month we opened five bottles that don’t often share a table. Our first Telos Vertical Tasting brought together five vintages of our icon Cabernet Sauvignon, 2015 through 2019, for a small group of guests at DUSK Restaurant in Stellenbosch.
Telos has always been Tokara’s most ambitious Cabernet Sauvignon. The Ferreira family conceived it from the outset as a wine drawn only from the very best the estate could produce in any given year, nothing more, nothing less. That idea, more than any single vintage, was really what the evening was about.
Winemaker Stuart Botha led guests through the wines one by one, talking through the season behind each: how much rain fell, how the weather behaved through ripening, what the growing conditions asked of the vines. Some years were kinder than others. The drought years came up again and again, and the conversation kept returning to how the vineyards held up under that pressure, and what that resilience actually tastes like in the glass years later.
What struck a few guests, they told us afterward, was how differently each vintage expressed itself while still being recognisably Telos. A 2015 doesn’t taste like a 2019, not remotely. But line them up side by side and the family resemblance is obvious, the same refusal to compromise running underneath five very different years.
It was the first time we’ve done a tasting quite like this, and it won’t be the last. There’s something a single bottle can never explain on its own that five vintages, poured together in one room, make immediately clear.
