An unexpected association came to my mind one evening a few weeks ago at Craftsteak. I was tasting the first and oldest of six vintages of Cape Mentelle Vineyards cabernet sauvignon, made in the remote Margaret River region of southwestern Australia. Sniffing and sipping that wine, vintage 1982, I found myself thinking back to the first case of Bordeaux I ever purchased, made half a world away from Cape Mentelle.

That wine was called Chateau Marsac-Séguineau, vintage 1975. Though it cost only $5 a bottle, right in line with a young journalist’s budget, it did come in a wood case, and I felt pretty good about owning it — until the first taste. The wine, made in the then-traditional style that was ungiving in youth, was so tannic I felt my gums would peel off. Any fruit in the wine was locked up tight. I hid away the remaining 11 bottles in a friend’s cellar and didn’t dare open another bottle for a decade. By then, the tannins had begun to soften and some blackcurrant and tobacco flavors were peeking out, along with a whiff of crushed dry leaves. Five more years passed, and Marsac-Séguineau had actually become a drinkable, if lean, “claret,” as the British like to call such old-fashioned Bordeaux. Drinkable with food, that is. It was still too angular to drink on its own.

Winemaking has changed dramatically in Bordeaux since vintage 1975.As the recent tasting of Cape Mentelle cabs made between 1982 and 2001 would demonstrate, the trend is worldwide. Fruit is picked riper (thanks, in part, to global warming) and tannins are

far less assaultive. The resulting wines may still take years to mature, but youthful gum killers are a relic more than a reality. While I haven’t tasted a recent vintage of Marsac-Séguineau, I’m confident that none would be as forbidding as that 1975. Nobody makes wines like that any more — or so I thought.

Yet, sipping the 1982 Cape Mentelle cabernet, I felt that my little Bordeaux had been reincarnated. Here were the same aromas of crushed autumn leaves, the same lean taste profile, the familiar sense of tough tannins that had finally mellowed.And this wine was no more alcoholic than Marsac-Séguineau had been.

Those resemblances between the two wines — one made in the epicenter of Bordeaux and the other a few miles from the Indian Ocean — had not been purely the result of chance. “We’re hippies and surfers who don’t much come in contact with the rest of the world,” Cape Mentelle’s winemaker, Robert Mann, said, describing the culture of Margaret River as he led the tasting. Well, that wasn’t quite the whole story. Cape Mentelle’s oldest cabernet sauvignon vineyard had been planted back in 1970, and by 1982 those hippies and surfers were worldly and skilled enough to know how to fashion a Bordeaux-style wine. “This 1982 cab was purposely made with hard tannic herbaceous qualities in its youth,” Mr. Mann said. “We went for leafiness and tobacco elements in the Bordeaux style.”

The next wine, Cape Mentelle’s 1986 cabernet, betrayed the beginnings of a riper style to come, showing mixed berry fruit that was absent from the 1982 vintage. But the alcohol was still low — only 12%, according to Mr. Mann. Then came the 1990 vintage, a wine that had been “picked for vibrancy” rather than plushness, but was “starting to get more mouth feel.” In keeping with winemaking trends around the world, the 1990 and 1995 vintages grew in flavor density — and alcohol levels. The final cabernet of the tasting, vintage 2001, was a dramatically intense wine, flooding my mouth with a surge of spicy cherry and cassis fruit, big young tannins, and lots of alcohol. Tasted blind, I’d have guessed that this was a modern muscle-flexer from Napa Valley.That would make it a superb cabernet, but not one that evokes Bordeaux.

I’d like to say that I could taste the generational connection between the oldest and youngest Cape Mentelle cabernets, all from the same vineyard. But changes in winemaking had effaced the impact of soil. Winemakers there and everywhere are picking for maximum flavor ripeness, which sometimes comes weeks after the arrival of sugar ripeness.The result is “big” wines with alcohol two or more degrees riper than traditional wines. The 2001 Cape Mentelle cab, in fact, weighs in at 15% alcohol — a level that I wish could be dialed back to 12% or 13% even if that means losing ripeness. That would return it to traditional alcohol levels, as in the 1982 and 1986 Cape Mentelle cabs — or the 1975 Marsac-Séguineau. The latter wine is no longer imported to America, but I spotted the 1975 vintage still available at a Long Island shop. At $39.95, it costs eight times what I once paid for it. That price suggests that in its fourth decade, the wine is it’s probably still going strong. Will today’s brawny, high-alcohol wines age gracefully for that long? Don’t bet on it.