Penfolds Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling 2013
$30; 11% alcohol;
screw cap; 92++ points
When that late rogue Leonard P. Evans OBE for some reason
decided that everyone in Australia should grow Chardonnay, he said it would
become "the vanilla essence of Australia". As a dude with something
of a vanillinoid obsession, I was disappointed that hardly any of the
Chardonnay we grew displayed any hint of vanilla; it was more like really bad
Riesling. Now, all those wasteful years later, here's a lovely Eden Valley
Riesling that has more shades of, well, not essence, but real vanilla bean.
Much more than most of that horrible Chardonnay ever afforded. It's predominantly limy, of course, like good
Eden Rizza, with the usual hints of citrus rind, candied orange, pith and
blossom, and smells too of the grainy sky of those old ranges in the summer,
but it also has a reassuring smooth creep that says vanilla to me. Like the
really fatty vanillinoids you'll find in Jackfruit. And that's all aroma. Drink
it, and you're straight back up the citrus tree. Lemon, lime, citron - even
bergamot - the whole damn family's there amongst the shiny leaves. The flavours taper off into that pristine
mountain brook freshness found only in the most elegant and fine of Rieslings.
The poise and balance are perfect. Bring it with whiting or gar flashed through
the pan with butter and lemon juice, white bread and Paris Creek butter, and
I'm anybody's. Five days later: The last glass sees most of those fleshy primary characters expired, as you'd expect, leaving the appropriate entwinement of those dusty/pithy rind-like phenolics, or tannins, with a stiff trainline of steely acidity. This authoritative chassis will see the wine last and develop over many years beneath that beautifully reliable screw cap. In retrospect, I'd add one point and another plus.
Penfolds Bin 311
Tumbarumba Chardonnay 2013
$40; 13% alcohol;
screw cap; 88+ points
Candied pear. Fresh Nashi pear. Muskmelon. Lemon junket.
Face cream. Pale charcuterie meats. Fresh-sliced Buderim ginger root. Dust. All
very neat and tidy; crisply pristine; fresh-faced; freckly; giggling. Palate
too, although in the mouth the wine has a little more flesh than even those fatty
aromas hinted. It reminds me here of a particularly good clean Chenin blanc
without botrytis: it's slightly waxy of texture and all pale melon and pear of
flavour, and very fine. Such a delicacy could have presented the winemakers
with a tricky show to balance without toppling, but they've done it: the
tannins are barely there; the acid perfectly unobtrusive. This'd be the one to
wean those Cloudy Bay addicts at the streetside tables of Double Bay with the
Maltese terriers licking their painted toes through the strappy Blahniks. Many
of them are making a wedge movement towards cheap Chablis. This'd be better,
but it's a lot more spendy. Five days later: This is a wine for medium-term cellaring; It'll last longer, but I'd probably prefer it in three or four years. Maybe 90+ points, having thought long and hard.
Penfolds Reserve
Bin A Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2012
$100; 12.5%
alcohol; screw cap; 93+++ points
When first opened, this wine seemed surly and flat. After
the immediate entertainments offered by previous editions, it was
disappointing. Especially when tasted alongside, say, the brilliant Moss WoodMargaret River 2012 (95+; $70). I thought maybe it had the post-bottling sulks,
but they usually recede after three months or six with whites, and this was
bottled on the first of March last year. By the end of day two there were signs
of life: at least the snoring ceased and the damn thing began making those
snuffling noises you'll get from a Labrador puppy. Now, four days on, the
bottle has almost expired, and it's doing the Robert de Niro "so whatter
you lookin' at?" trick. The fruit - mainly ripe white peach - is still
somewhat surly, but it's gradually been crowned by a halo of carbide, cordite
and split slate or mudstone. This all stacks up to a wine that will astonish
those who can afford to stack $100 bills in a cellar for six or ten years,
hoping that when they get 'em out and count 'em, there'll be a lot more of 'em
in there. Hardcore Penfolds redsters know this feeling well. As for the
percentage of astonishment? I'd say 5% - 15%, compound, in organolepticoins.
Penfolds Yattarna
Chardonnay 2011
$150; 13% alcohol;
screw cap; 95+++ points
Probably the most vast, impenetrable white wine I can
recall, this monster is as close as Penfolds has yet got to the true spirit of
a "white Grange". At once more
promising than the recalcitrant Bin A, this brute seems to just sit there on
the ground, more Great Pyramid than Sphinx. It has no face to fall off. It even
smells like the bloody pyramids. I've been letting it play two games with me.
The first is pouring it cold, and letting its movie unfold as it warms. Those
edgy, acrid reeks of cordite and other very dangerous explosives grow with
great deliberation, awakening the old powder monkey in me. The second is
repeating this day after day, as the bottle wanes and the wine gradually admits
oxygen through the cracks between its mighty bricks. Fruit? Chardonnay. Forget
all those melons and vanillinoids and peaches and whatnot. They're all here in
great force, but only to be united in a Chardonnay as intense and majestic as Chardonnay
gets, anywhere. I'd like to offer more precision in my prophecy about this
wine's ascension to glory, but it is simply too thick and concentrated and
closed yet for more accurate analysis. If I were Peter Gago I'd be expecting some
shareholder-obsessed Grace Longhurst writing from head office to accuse me of “accumulating large stocks of
wine which to all intents and purposes were unsaleable,” ordering me to cease
production forthwith. Bugger them. When this wine finally enters into
Heaven, to sit on the right hand of God, it'll be the first time a Chardonnay's
done that without the Almighty grunting "Get off my goddam hand." Five days later: the worst thing that's happened is the wine's beginning to look a bit more along the lines of what everybody seems to imagine Chardonnay should be like. If my plus signs, which indicate cellaring potential, extended so far, I'd add another on this the last glass in the bottle. Stunning.
PS: I wrote this following poem about air, not wine, in the heat of an horrid summer. But it seems to perfectly fit the nature of the Yattarna:
PS: I wrote this following poem about air, not wine, in the heat of an horrid summer. But it seems to perfectly fit the nature of the Yattarna:
The nature of sky
Now that I see the air is made of blocks
Drystone style – no mortar
Not being putty
I get trouble with the tiny gaps
It’s better on the days the masons chamfer
the corners
Something about that neat angle where the
bricks kiss
But you’ll always get shit like this
bastard
Just straight basalt blocks cut so square
You’d think the cracks were drawn on
Philip White
Penfolds Cellar Reserve Adelaide Hills Pinot Noir 2013
$40; 14% alcohol;
cork (!); 91+ points
The notion of Penfolds fitting a Pinot noir into its
house style has always amused me, especially given Australia's belief that good
Pinot is all cherries and strawberries. But the confounding intensity of wines
like La Tâche or Domaine de l'Arlot (in the days of Jean-Pierre de Smet) shows "great"
Burgundy can also be great in size and force, and not much like strawberries at
all. This gives Peter Gago and his team a window through which they can build Pinots
with the sort of unflinching intensity, tannin and depth that shows through
most of the Penfolds Shiraz wines. This one has aromas of black tea tin and dark
nightshade greens as much as, well, black cherry juice so profound you expect
bitter flavours, or kirsch. The wine is quite unctuous in the mouth: it's big
and viscous, and reminds me of the moonshine fortified cherry wine we'd buy in flagons
from a senior artist called, I think, Peter Carey, in Corkscrew Gully in the early' seventies.
After that hearty flood of feeling the wine tapers quickly to a long lemony acid
tail with very fine tannins. So it's more of a squish than a Tâche this year,
but a hearty, sensual wine nevertheless. It's certainly more Penfolds in style
than, say, the elegant, angular Pinots of Yarra and Mornington, and a maybe little
cheaper than the best of them. I want it next year with runny goat cheese and
walnut biscuits. Four days later: Longer, smoother, syrupy, losing the primaries now, as you'd expect. Give it five years.
Penfolds Bin 138
Barossa Shiraz Grenache Mataro 2012
$40; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 88+++ points
A logical step on from the Pinot, this wine shares some
of its fleshy black cherry with that wine, but here the cherries are Grenache-derived,
and they're sandwiched between the blackberry vines of the Shiraz and the black
Iberian ham and leather of the Mataro. There's some tea-tin, too; even the
tinge of the smithy's forge. Overall, the smell's a rich plum, cherry and
blackberry stew on the woodfire stove, with all its fire and iron. Texturally,
it's much more slender and snaky than the Pinot; flavour-wise, it's much less
primary fruit and more of that fire and iron. And the leaf of the blackberry as
much as its fruit. It's an elegant wine which could use four or five years of
dungeon to give those fruits a chance to get up and get mellifluous. Now, I'd
have it with stewy roo or venison with black olives, juniper berries and bay
leaves; mash and baby beetroot on the side. Four days later: All smoothly assimilated now, dominated by Marello cherries. Still a lovely thing. An extra point or two.
Penfolds Bin 2 South
Australia Shiraz Mourvèdre 2012
$30; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 89+ points
Hearty and meaty and rustic and old-fashioned, the style
of this one reminds me of the old Shiraz Ouillade reds Max Schubert made in the
'sixties, the Ouillade being Cinsault. For what I imagine to be a similarly
arcane reason, the marketing thinktank of today suddenly calls what we've
always known as Mataro Mourvèdre, perhaps to get us feeling more French. This
is a bright prune-and-blackberry thing in the fruit sector, silky and slick
feels gradually falling below the dust and velvet of the tannins. But if we
must think of the south of France, like the Roussillon area, wines like this
are two-a-penny, thanks partly to a couple of generations of young Australian
winemaking graduates who went there in search of work and taught them how to
make cleaner drinks without bothering to learn much from them until much later
in the piece. So there you go. A good easy drink, but expensive. Four days later: Everything's gone, except the wine. The bottle's still half full. I'd remove two or three points and that plus. Drink on purchase if you can find it deservedly discounted
Penfolds Bin 28
Kalimna South Australia Shiraz 2011
$40; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 89++ points
Kalimna was an old Barossa vineyard when Penfolds bought it
in 1945. Its new release Shiraz, the Bin 170 2010, will enter the market on May
1st at $1800 per bottle. The 'South
Australia' bit of the name on this Bin 28 indicates the fruit is from anywhere
in that whole rambling state, but not necessarily Kalimna. Like, if you could get $1800 a bottle for Kalimna
fruit, why on earth would you be selling it like this at $40? Duh. If those
prices are any indicator, there's at least 142 Bins of difference, and some of
them appear to be water. In wasting the value of the grand Kalimna name so, Penfolds
seems intent on sending it down the same treacherous discount trail as Koonunga
Hill, which was a beautiful reliable red from a beautiful reliable vineyard
until they wasted that name on what has become just another huge generic blend
destined for the discount bins. Koonunga, incidentally, means mound of
excrement, making the hill redundant, so it's probably just as well. Anyway,
this wine is fruitsweet and juicy, with fine dry tannins and a bonnie, open
countenance. It has a hint of that staunch stance that marks Penfolds, but on
the other hand it could be mistaken for a whole lot of components that were
just a touch too tannic for inclusion in a middle-range Wolf Blass. Confused?
So am I. But there's nothing confusing about actually drinking this wine. It's not too bad at all. Roast lamb. Spinach.
Parsnips. Four days later: Ew. Very telling degradation. Make it 80, at about half that price.
Penfolds Bin 128
Coonawarra Shiraz 2012
$40; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 78 points
Who the hell thought up these prices? Here's a Shiraz cordial sort of a drink. This is not what David Wynn had in mind when
he bought Coonawarra in 1951: he could have made wine like this from many highly-watered parts
of Victoria, where he and his Dad Sam traditionally bought fruit much more
cheaply than Coonawarra could offer, even if they had to then blend in some
grapes from their huge bushvine vineyards at Modbury, and maybe a bucket or two
of Wendouree currants, which they bought by the drayload. It's a minty, spicy,
cheeky little cordial, mind you, inoffensive and simple, but showing just about
the same amount of side tit necessary to get your mechanic to refill the thing
that makes your windscreen wipers squirt that stuff on, you know, like, the
windscreen. Four days later: Sour and astringent, as I'd expect after my initial notes. It looked a bit better at day two - maybe I was hard on it, or drunk, or thinking of side boob, but nah, I doubt it. $40 is nonsense. This is an $18 wine.
Penfolds Bin 150
Marananga Barossa Shiraz 2011
$80; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 92++ points
Once one's digested the reality of Kalimna Shiraz coming
from anywhere in South Australia, and not really Kalimna at all, Marananga sounds,
well, what. If one then has sufficient remnant curiosity to read this back
label, which says this wine is "... named after the stack location where
the barrels of wine were matured in Penfolds Barossa Valley Winery's barrel
hall," you probably couldn't be bothered going on to read the next bit
which claims the wine comes from the Marananga district, which is where geniuses
like David Powell and Michael Twelftree moved their tankfarm refineries after Michael and
Annabelle Waugh, using real wooden barrels without a tankfarm, began winning perfect scores from Robert Parker Jr., who has a
lot to answer for, via the crafty manoevreings of of the open-minded USA Jewish bacon merchant Dan Phillips, who eventually went broke, leaving many small Australians even shorter. Anyway, as one who really appreciates the very old geology
of that little bit of the Barossa, I am convinced that this wine really does
come from there, because it's pure Georgadis in style, that being the name of
the major grower. It has the chocolate-fruit-and-nuts panforte characters of the best
neighbouring vineyards, and its mood is glowering and tannic like the bats that
swoop in the darkest bit of the ghost train. Maybe it's just the tiniest bit
salty, like some of the local creekline vineyards. It's certainly a lot more
true to Maranaga than that stack location. Juicy, dribbling, pink roast beef is
the go. Now I'm dribbling. Five days later: This peaked about two days back. It's astringent and marshy now, and I still feel suss about salt. Probly wrong, but that's my feeling. Fairly pointed first time, but it looks very expensive now. Trading on the sub-region's fame?
Penfolds Bin 407
South Australia Cabernet Sauvignon 2011
$80; 14% alcohol;
screw cap; 90++ points
Musk, moss, tussocks, lots of very deep green things, white
mushrooms, the earth they grew in ... prunes, juniper, soft dried apple, fudge
... coffee, black tea leaves ... slightly gingery oak ... here's a sombre,
brooding Cabernet after the Medoc style. All those things are very well locked
in and assimilated - I have to try hard to sort them out. But it has that red
summer dust, too, making it very Australian. Conserve, but not jam. Complex,
not cheeky. It's a self-satisfied sort of aroma; it doesn't quite let you in.
It certainly doesn't tell any jokes. It has a set of feelings and flavours that
follow that course to the T, gradually letting its clean lemony acid take control,
easing you out slowly. The tannins are very fine; the wine only hints at astringency.
It's just nicely furry in the finish. It really does need a few years for its fruit-juicy
bits to emerge. Juicy lamb cutlets. Five days later: Fading, but it hung in there very well. Still looks like a modest Medoc. Straight Cabernets of this quality are rare in South Australia, Fair points, if a tad spendy.
Penfolds Bin 169
Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2010
$350; 14.5%
alcohol; screw cap; 96+ points
For horrid personal reasons (like grief) my notes on this
beauty failed to make it onto my list of reviews upon its release last year, so
it's a fine thing to look at it again after a twelvemonth I wish I could
forget. Obviously, the wine has enjoyed its year better than I did mine. It is
growing the most ravishing of perfumes. Juniper, aniseed, bergamot, violets -
this is why Cabernet confounds the noses of the greatest parfumiers - all these
aromas and many more, most unlikely, bounce about without yet showing much sign
of sitting there together in the back until the front ones learn to drive. That
aside, the whole business is just so completely disarmingly stunning and
humorous it never fails to make me smile. This is the dream of the aroma that David
Wynn imagined when he began the rejuvenation of the decrepit Coonawarra sixty
years ago. He'd love this were he still with us. It has the elegance that only
Cabernet can sport, but very, very rarely does, even in Coonawarra. Put most
simply, it is a heavenly liquor: the stuff that makes wine permanent, even if
an essence of this purity is so rarely attained. If I had a dozen, I'd put it
in the twenty year bin, only to discover in 2034 that I'd gutsed them all
without regret. If you are ever faced with the notion of having one last drink,
this would be the perfect candidate. Try and keep the bottle going for three or
four days, then you'll be more accepting of following it down. Five days later: Enough said. Ravishing.
Penfolds Bin 389
South Australia Cabernet Shiraz 2011
$80; 14% alcohol;
screw cap; 93++ points
Smooth and mellow, harmonious and gently alluring from
the first sniff, this seems to me to be the best 389 for years. It has hints of
red and black fruits and various things critics normally hunt for in the snifter
- it oozes old harness, dates and dried figs, for example - but overall it triggers
a wistful mindful of good solid things from a past many of us can barely recall,
if indeed we were lucky enough to smell such stuff in the first place. You'd never recall any of these aromas if you
grew up in a block of flats, for example. Or at the beach. It's a wine of mood
rather than bright facets, all assimilated and harmonised in the textbook
Penfolds style of yore. It's almost melancholic. Forget the "Baby Grange"
nonsense some marketing twerp thought up Bacchus only knows how many vintages
ago - it's nothing like Grange. But it IS pure Penfolds. The flavours are right
up the same old barn: hessian dries; bags of plums and old apples in the
stable. Then there's just the cutest, most appropriate rise of fresh dark
fruits about half way through, after which those perfect old tannins and pithy,
lemony acids seep in, stirring the drinker to reach out through the dream for
another pour. It's a wine I could just sit and drink for its perfect
ponderance. Have a couple right up with people you can talk to, but really
really try to stack some away. This'll undress you in ten years. Five days later: Peaked on day three. Still a lovely nostalgic reverie in this glass ... I'm drinking it with Beethoven's Last Quartets. It's still a perfectly presentable luxury of a drink, worth the money, but only if you cellar it awhile. I'd give it another plus, maybe another point.
Penfolds St Henri
Shiraz 2010
$95; 14.5% alcohol;
screw cap; 93+++ points
St Henri being a personal perve item - Edmund Mazure honed
its original recipe in the 1880s in an old winery I played in as a kid in
Kanmantoo - I always come over a tad runny in the middle when the moment comes
to unlock each new release. In this its awkward youth, this one seems more
Penfolds than Henri just now. But play with it, let it loll about a big glass,
give it the hour of day, and you'll begin to see the difference: this will be a
wine of perfect smooth seduction when its dusty tannins have done their preserving
job and fall to the bottom. In a way it's more like the big brother of the 389
than a sibling of the grander Shiraz wines coming up next. It's a wistful and
nostalgic thing. If there's anything that's off the recipe, it's that wee
strand of seaside dunal flavour that comes from the inclusion of Limestone
Coast fruit, making me think of salt. But I'm sure Bacchus, Pan and the passage of time sort that out. Well,
I hope so. Six magnums under the bed for my eightieth, please. If it's salty I'll hurl the empties at you. Five days later: Apart from the slump of cheeky primaries, which you'd expect, there's not much change.
Penfolds RWT
Barossa Valley Shiraz 2011
$175; 14.5%
alcohol; screw cap; 95+++ points
Holy Hell. My mouth is having a funny turn. This is
ravishing. It's the tight, ungiving French warship forest oak, rather than the sappier
American wood we see in most of these super-premium luxuries. It gives this
most Australian Shiraz a more satisfactory edge. It's the wood Max would have
loved getting for his first Granges, but the war had blown the forests to
smithereens and the Penfolds mob simply couldn't afford to buy the ridiculously
expensive leftovers. It's so united and locked in it seems smugly determined to
get on with its very long life - it doesn't even realise I'm drinking it. It
won't be vaguely ready to drink for a decade. I'm sure I'd write a lot more if
I sat here and drank the whole bottle, but I'm gonna revisit this one for days.
I'm riveted. Five days later: The penultimate glass: it's still raw, fresh and completely disinterested in the fact that I'm tipping it into my black gizzards. It acts as if my kidney filters will be no challenge at all. Call it Gallic arrogance if you will, but there's also a bloody big lump of Ocker disrespect for authority at the fore. We'll show 'em. I'd love to sit down and drink a sixpack of these with the late great Gerard Jaboulet - he would have loved it, and marvelled, and smoked away and nodded and giggled. He had to postpone an appointment once so sent Mon and me to a restaurant in Hermitage where we ate a flat plate of lentils and thin slices of carrot in a pork stock with truffles. That was it. The simple perfection of the south. There was a decanted '78 La Chappelle there waiting. I'd give anything to try that lunch again, but with him and Max Schubert and a bottle of this, especially when it's thirty years old. We'd need a dozen, as the day wound by. I'll bet Max woulda forgotten his emphysema and had a Gauloise. Heaven's above!
Penfolds Magill
Estate Shiraz 2011
$130; 13.5%
alcohol; cork(!); 95++ points
Mmmm. Look at those alcohols. Only thirteen and half of
'em. Brings to mind Max's 1951 recipe for his newly envisioned Grange,
in which he determined the fruit would be picked between 11.5 and 12 Baumé. And
it would comprise half fruit from this vineyard, and half from the 650
million-year-old Umberatana group siltstones and limestones of Morphett Vale, around
the church where my Dad preached the hot gospel on the odd Sunday night. He wouldna preached in a Baptist church if it wasna for the cash, and he panicked about us kids going out to play in the Devil's grape vines after the lost souls hit the sawdust trail, if indeed any bothered to. That's all impossible-to-recover
geology now, that ground there. It's buried beneath execrable suburbia. There's only one bit of this prime
geology left, at Seaford Heights, at the entry to the McLaren Vale vignoble,
and that's being "developed" as I write. Forget the election: on this priceless, irreplaceable piece of farming land, both
parties support the vandalism: there's only callow decrepitude on both sides. Fuck
them. This is a supple, lithe, brilliant wine. It has perfect balance and
demeanour, even in this its youth. I can see my fingers through it as I hold
the glass. It is not black. It is full of life and promise. To some it would
seem a little raw. It is. But this old blistered palate can assure you that
this will be a wine many plagued with regret will only hear and read about in
the decades to come, because those of stronger faith sold their car and bought
it all. Prepare to beg at their tent flaps. Three days later:
Still growing, if a little more assimilated and velvety. The most
Australian Shiraz. It makes me weep over the Grange/Magill vineyards John Spalvins and
John Justin Roche between them pulled out for subdivision in the early '80s, with the
approval of the Labor government of the day. That broke Max Schubert's heart, and to a great degree, his will. Roche went off to West Australia and spent the money planting a vineyard in the Frankland region, way down south. Within a few years, that was the first vineyard I saw in Australia that was rotten with salt. But this wine? It's brilliant. Give it another plus, and drink a bitter toast to idiocy and greed.
Penfolds Bin 95 Grange
2009
$785; 14.5%
alcohol; cork (!), 93+++ points
Smashed schist and fudge are words you won't find in any
of PR guff for this wine. Smells that are worlds apart. But they're what I get
upon my liberation of this poor imprisoned thing. Massage it back to life with
jug swirls and double decants and the gap between these extremes begins to fill
with little oozes from one side or the other. Carbon comes from the stony side;
banana esters and fresh tar from the other. The tar gradually remembers its
roots in vegetation, and it lets wimpers of prune and juniper and Deadly
Nightshade berries loose. It is a black velvet wine after two hours. It has no
shimmer. After four hours there's a hint of prune. Promising. At least prunes
have shiny skins. At this stage the flavours are showing signs of edema: it is
a raw, brutal, gradually swelling thing. It was not built for this vulgar
molestation. It was triggered, after all, in the year of obscene heat
which in retrospect seems a rehearsal for 2014. But rather than tip this first
glass back into the bottle where it belongs, I have savoured it right up to the
moment of the Penfolds press embargo lifting. So I publish. Points? How do you
measure this baby's life before its umbilical is severed? I've taken the advice
of the anaesthetist and put up 93 with the imagining of more plus signs than my
rigorous protocols permit. Don't take any notice. That may go up and down over
the next days. I shall post adjustments here as I work on a glass a day til
it's empty. Watch this space. Three days later: The wine is beginning to harmonise and perhaps even glow as it sucks in the oxygen. It still lacks any shiny reflections: its flavours are all matte black, like a well-dressed woodfire stove. For lack of understanding - I don't lack faith - I'll hand it another point, perhaps expecting to give it more in a day or two if I can avoid drinking it all in a wild lustful surge. It is only now revealing touches of delightful primary fruit. Blueberries and blackcurrants, prune and mainly marello cherries in kirsch, dusted with confectioner's sugar. It also has that wicked traditional twist of young balsamic, which in such modest degree simply serves to make me more huuuunnngreee. 25-30 year wine, no worries. Especially if it had a screw cap. Right now, a jug of it with spooned Stilton and Patum Puperium Gentleman's Relish on thin rye toasts would set me swooning. Even in horrid vintages like this, Peter Gago and his stern determined team are making the best Granges, although of course I couldn't taste Max's models fresh upon release until I hit the red in the early 'seventies. My bad.
The tip-outs jug contains one damn fine drink. I wish my beloved Lord Twining was alive to share it, but it seems they found him dead five weeks back where he often slept in the park near that disgusting National Wine Centre. Twining loved his Grange as much as he loved his Krug. For information about the book Milton and Wordley and I just made, A year in the life of Grange, click here. Or here. This book was published independently of Penfolds, who had no editorial control whatever. It has earned acclaim that humbles me.
