Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022 - 84

PENFOlDS' MaGIll
ESTaTE WINERY IN
THE aDElaIDE HIllS
AUSTRALIA | SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Penfolds
With 30 Top 100 Winery awards, Peter Gago and his winemaking
team are expanding their work to great terroirs of
the Northern Hemisphere.
If you want to be convInced about the pleasure of
FOUNDED:
1844
WINEMAKER:
Peter Gago
OWNER:
Treasury Wine Estates
IMPORTER:
Treasury Wine Estates,
Napa, CA
84
drinking Penfolds' wines, choose any of the many
we've recommended this year and sit on them for two
decades. That might seem like a long time to wait,
but odds are, you won't be disappointed. Penfolds
wines have longevity, developing dimensions that are
simply not possible for a young wine to share. Not
that all the bins and vintages age into wines of equal
stature, but the intellectual rigor surrounding Penfolds'
winemaking strategies consistently translates into
sensual pleasure and a sensation of complexity. Some
of those complexities are terroir-driven, as in the Magill
Estate Shiraz, while most are created by a process of
rating terroirs over time. The team makes each block
separately, then takes those wines through classification
tastings, blind. That historical knowledge of estate and
grower-sourced fruit informs their selections for each
blend. It is the integration of those blends that defines
the Penfolds style, sustained by the leadership of four
chief winemakers, beginning with Max Schubert, who
headed up the team that created Grange in the early
1950s. Under contemporary chief winemaker Peter
Gago, the team is now exploring how best to focus the
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Penfolds lens on classical terroirs such as Bordeaux's
Haut-Médoc, where they recently installed header
boards in the fermentation tanks at Cambon la Pelouse.
" In really challenging years, we can cut down to the best,
except when it comes to A-1 cabernet, " Gago explains,
" which is why we're in Bordeaux and Napa Valley. " In
fact, the team has been working in California since
1988 and, this year, the highest rating for any Penfolds
wine this year went to their first release of a Napa Valley
cabernet sauvignon. -J.G
2018 Napa Valley Bin 704 Cabernet Sauvignon ($70, 95
points) In Napa Valley, the Penfolds team taps into the vineyard
assets of Treasury Wine Estates, their parent company.
Andrew Baldwin works with small blocks of fruit from some
of Treasury's top sites, adding purchased fruit from growers,
taking all the separate lots through a classification tasting.
It's clean and friendly, the richness of its oak emboldening
the red-currant brightness of flavor. It may not taste like
a Penfolds wine-being that it grows in Napa Valley rather
than South Australia-but it feels like a Penfolds wine in its
fine textural integration, a cabernet of silken elegance.
2017 South Australia Grange ($800, 94 points) Cinnamon,
star anise and five spice mark the oak scents of this
latest vintage of Grange. It comes from a season that broke
out of the drought with plentiful winter rains and few heat
spikes in summer. Though it doesn't yet show the drama
of some of the top vintages of Penfolds' top wine, it may
well with time: After a day open, it begins to show its sleek
beauty, the supple fruit battling oak tannins, filling them
completely while not yet flipping into the seat of power. A
stealth Grange, this needs ten years or more to reveal itself
more fully.
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