The Adelaide Oval is South Australia’s football stadium, where we’d taken the lift to the top tier and walked a long hall to the main box. It was a rainy Friday morning in spring, the stadium was empty and the scoreboard was lit with the dedicated activity of the day, Penfolds’ Rewards of Patience tasting.
This event takes place once every five years or so, when the firm’s lead winemakers, both current and ex-officio, gather with a few members of the press for a weeklong tasting. It includes most every vintage of most every major Penfolds wine, from Koonunga Hill on up the scale. Along with Penfolds recorking clinics, this project is intended to keep both the winemakers and the critics focused on how Penfolds wines age.
As any sensible company would do, Penfolds stacked the deck in the wines’ favor: The tasting was held close to the source of where the wines were grown and made, with as many backup bottles as possible. For this, the final day of the tasting, we set out to taste 53 vintages of Grange, a wine developed several miles from here in the cellars of Magill by Max Schubert, who made mostly fortified wines at what had been in the 1940s and ’50s a family company run by Herbert Leslie Hyland-Penfold.
Earlier in the week, we’d been based at Kalimna, tasting in the parlor of an old farmhouse on the vineyard in northern Barossa. Salvation jane was in bloom; the weed blankets Barossa’s paddocks in purple, a contrast to the green rows of vines. One benefit of the location was its proximity to Block 42, a small community of elder vines planted in the 1880s, believed by Penfolds to be the oldest cabernet sauvignon vines in the world.
On Wednesday morning, we had tasted a flight of six wines made from Block 42, including the first Bin 707, vintage 1964 (100 percent Block 42) and two recent special bin releases from 1996 and 2004. The wine of the day was an older bottling, an early, experimental vintage of Grange, when Schubert still, perhaps, held out some hope that his top wine could be, like Bordeaux, a cabernet sauvignon.
The 1953 Bin 9 is the only Grange labeled Cabernet Sauvignon rather than Hermitage (as in shiraz). As it was poured, Peter Gago, Penfolds chief winemaker, motioned out the window to the vines, “Just up that way,” he said, pointing up the hill to the northwest.
The wine was astonishing, the aroma still fresh–cedar, tobacco, mature cabernet at its highest level. Aristocratic in its stature. Barossa cheerful. It touched the tongue with a cloud of flavor that lasted for minutes. Ethereal and endless.
I didn’t want to taste anything after it.
As we walked across the vineyard to lunch that day, Ray Beckwith drove up in his small, late-model SUV. Now in his mid-90s, Beckwith had started working for Leslie Hyland-Penfold in the 1930s and became the company’s secret wunderkind, having tied the high spoilage rate of wine at Penfolds to pH. By monitoring and adjusting the pH, he wiped out the problem. Though it’s hard to prove definitively, Australians believe Beckwith was the first in the world to monitor pH in wine, today a basic tenet of enology.
Beckwith had worked at the winery in Nuriootpa and on occasion consulted with Schubert at Magill. On one such visit in 1947, when Schubert was beginning to experiment with dry red table wines, Beckwith had shared some of his observations about bacterial spoilage and the role of pH. “Max adopted the concept enthusiastically,” Beckwith later wrote, “carrying it forward to the later production of Grange and his other classical dry red wines.”
Meanwhile, Penfolds was trying to develop flor-fermented sherry in the 1940s and losing two-thirds of their production to fermentations gone wrong. Leslie Hyland-Penfold charged Beckwith with finding a fix in the lab, and sent Schubert to Jerez to learn how the Spanish handled flor. “Grange was a side effect of that trip,” Beckwith says, with a nonagenarian’s wry sense of humor.
In 1950, Beckwith was on board with the company goal of making great sherry. Schubert’s fascination was dry red table wine, no matter how popular sherry had become. So he took the opportunity while in Europe to stop in Bordeaux. He met with Christian Cruse, of the prominent winemaking and merchant firm, who gave him “the rare opportunity of tasting and evaluating Bordeaux wines between 40 and 50 years old that were still sound and possessed magnificent bouquet and flavour.”
Unfortunately, Schubert was not there to reminisce with Beckwith during my visit; he died in 1994. For this article, I’ve lifted Schubert’s quotes from a paper he presented at the first Australian National University Wine Symposium in Canberra in 1979. The work he undertook on his return from Bordeaux led to the first experimental vintage of Grange, 150 cases of the 1951, a wine that never made it to commercial release.
And so I had bought a ticket and flown to Adelaide for an equally rare opportunity–to taste and evaluate Australian wines close to 60 years old. It was the most extensive Grange tasting Penfolds has conducted, 1952 through 2005. Today the wines from the 1950s have become so rare that this may have been the last complete Grange tasting Penfolds will be able to conduct.
There are other New World regions with dry red table wines that have survived the test of time. But I have not yet tasted such a complete range of wines from the New World that have as much personality as Grange from the 1950s. Schubert said, “Grange Hermitage has always been a controversial and an individual wine.” That such a wine should set the winemaking style for a large corporate winery such as Penfolds is one of the mysterious cultural phenomena of Australia.
It was not a corporate decision to produce Grange. That decision came out of Schubert’s reaction to the older wines he had been tasting in Europe–he had as his goal “the idea of producing an Australian red wine capable of staying alive for a minimum of 20 years and comparable with those produced in Bordeaux É an attempt to do something to lift the rather mediocre standard of Australian red wine in general at the time.” This was not a commercial project; it was more a scientific experiment.
Those early experimental wines–particularly the ’52, ’53 and ’55 tasted a few miles from the cellar in which they were made–are more than mere ghosts. They are present in the glass, feisty and still fresh. They haven’t unraveled in old age, they haven’t begun to separate into alcohol and tannin and acidity. Instead they glow as one complete entity. They seem to have stepped out of time.
Famously, those wines were rejected by Schubert’s contemporaries in a tasting in 1956. The company’s board, led by Gladys Hyland-Penfold, reacted by shutting down the Grange project, a decision that Schubert, known to be a company man, ignored. He did so with the full support and complicity of Jeffrey Hyland-Penfold (Leslie’s son and Gladys’s nephew), who was governing director of the firm. As Beckwith recalled, the younger Hyland-Penfold was not known for buckling to authority and was often in conflict with his father at Nuriootpa. “At one point, Jeffrey told his father what to do with the chimney on top of the winery. His father sent him down to McLaren Vale.” In any case, without a budget and with no new oak, the wines made from 1957 through ’59 are weaker and have not held up as well. As the earlier wines matured, they began to receive acceptance; Penfolds reinvested in the project with the 1960 vintage and promoted Schubert to chief winemaker.
Schubert described the process by which he made these wines in clear, logical terms–which makes one wonder why more winemakers don’t follow such simple strictures today. The selection process started with the grapes “to ensure that the grape material was sound and that the acid and sugar content was in balance consistent with the style of wine specified.” Simple enough, but, in fact, it was probably his strictest limitation. It generally ruled out cabernet sauvignon in South Australia, due to issues of quality and consistency. Instead, he looked to old-vine sources of shiraz within a narrow window of ripeness: “Using the Baumé scale, this was not to be less than 11.5 degrees and not more than 12 degrees with a total acidity of not less than 6.5 and not more than 7 grams per liter. With strict attention to detail and close surveillance, this was achieved.”
He purchased five new untreated oak hogsheads similar to the kind he had seen used in France and tested the same wine aged in the new oak and in a large, neutral oak vat.
For the winemaking, he used heading-down boards in an open-top fermenter, so the cap formed by the grape skins would remain submerged in the juice. He set out to control the pace of fermentation so it would occur at an even rate and would be completed in 12 days–a sugar conversion rate of one Baumé degree per day. “A further measure of control was achieved by using a graph system that showed the ideal fermentation line over a 12-day period compared with the actual fermentation line, which was governed by daily temperature and Baumé readings of the fermenting juice.” His plan involved extracting the optimal amount from the skins during that limited period of time by draining the tank of juice, then pumping the juice back over the skins. Using a heat exchanger as the wine was pumped, he planned to control the temperature to either speed up or slow down the fermentation.
During the later stage of fermentation, as the process slowed, he found he had achieved sufficient color, body and aroma in the wine so he drained it off the skins, some of it into the new barrels, some into the old 1,000-gallon vat, to finish fermentation and age. He pressed the remaining solids to use for topping up the barrels.
This winemaking program, established for Grange, has set the protocol for any number of variations within the Penfolds stable of red wines.
There have been four winemakers who have headed up the Penfolds team, and if their batting average with Grange can be used to assess their overall performance, then Schubert wins, hands down. It was, after all, his creation. He was skilled in producing formidable wines with the fireworks that define Grange today, wines like the 1962, which is still a meaty shiraz, powerful and floral, with the warmth of the season. He also produced some seamless and elegant wines in less than ideal vintages, such as 1964, a wet growing season saved by a long, cool autumn. This wine, with its scents of rose petals and red currants, feels silken, a gentle preservation of finely ripened fruit. The 1966, more in the powerful mode, shows a hint of green stemminess that belies one factor underscoring Schubert’s style.
As I struggled to articulate the difference between Schubert’s wines and those that followed, James Halliday offered one hint for their remarkable integration. Halliday, a noted author and winemaker, is part of the extended company team. “One thing Schubert never did was add acid,” he said. “He relied on deliberately green-picked components. I think that’s part of the finesse of those early wines.” When we tasted the ’71, one of the top wines prior to Schubert’s retirement in ’73, Halliday pointed out another aspect of Schubert’s style. “He was deliberately inducing volatile acidity, that was part of his style.”
Ian Hickinbotham, winemaker at Wynn’s Coonawarra in the early 1950s, had made a similar comment to me several years ago. “Schubert used to encourage volatile acidity,” he said, “leaving the bungs out of the cask. He would take samples around to other winemakers and ask if it was too much.”
Gago and his team opened four bottles of the 1971, the best one still suffering a bit from that volatility. But then it opened to a beautiful range of fruit and sleek tannins. What you lose in the initial mustiness, you gain in the wild mulberry, cranberry and boysenberry flavors. It almost seems a contradiction that a wine this volatile could be this fresh. And it’s part of the idiosyncrasy that Schubert managed to champion at Penfolds.
Don Ditter took over on Schubert’s retirement in 1973, having joined Penfolds in 1942. John Duval, whose family’s vineyards at Morphett Vale in Adelaide provided half the fruit for Schubert’s first vintage of Grange, became chief winemaker in 1986. Gago took over the reins in 2002. In every case, there has been long overlap with the winemakers working together as a team.
Though there were some compelling wines in the late ’70s and ’80s, there were also more misses–including a lot more flavors of raisins and prunes. The best of Ditter’s vintages, ’76 and ’78, have more depth of fruit, more meat on the bone, than Schubert’s wines showed at their current age. 1982, which is a controversial Penfolds vintage (it held no standouts among the other Penfolds ranges at the tasting), proved to be a delicious and heady Grange, with sunny, sweet red raspberry flavor. Two of the wines from Ditter’s tenure particularly caught my attention, both from relatively cool summers–the ’75 and ’84, both integrated and still fresh.
Duval’s first vintage, the 1986, was the first wine to feel effusive–though it’s hard to separate winemaking intention from the age and maturity of the wines. The ’86 is the sort of delicious, jammy wine that inspires overwrought prose: “flowing robes of satiny fruit flavors.”
He didn’t really hit again until 1990 and ’91, a pair of vintages that inaugurated the modern Penfolds style. These were among the first vintages of Grange I had tasted on release, and though the ’90 showed dynamic bright red fruit and a lovely texture, I have always been partial to the ’91. It has the intensity that sets Grange apart in a great vintage, defining syrah as it mellows from what was once a youthful explosion to more subtle power.
The highlight of Duval’s career must be the 1996 Grange, among the top Grange vintages for its length of flavor and drive. If some of the classics from the ’50s and ’60s glowed with the taste of fraise des bois, fragile and delicate, here that flavor was amplified in its youth. It feels like it grew on perfectly balanced vines, powered by winter rains that sustained them through a mild, dry season. It hasn’t begun to show any maturity (the new oak is still present), and it looks to have the longest potential to age.
The 2002, reviewed in this issue’s tasting section, is not the first indication of Gago’s talents (he built the RWT program in the ’90s with Duval, who didn’t retire, in fact, until after the winemaking for this vintage was complete). It is, however, a great Grange, and may well mature in the mode of other cool years like 1964 and 1975, perhaps significantly better.
I asked Gago whether he thought this wine would age in the silkier mode of the early Schubert vintages, whether he imagined it with that more ethereal form of power, or with the added weight, the plump, Buck Mulligan stance of more modern Grange.
“In broad terms,” Gago said, “I think the Schubert vintages were derivatives of what climatic conditions delivered–augmented by varying types and volumes of pressings fractions, and varying percentages of cabernet sauvignon.
“Back through the decades, alcohol levels vary quite profoundly, although it would be fair and accurate to acknowledge that none currently have hit the alcohol minimums of years like 1971. In the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, [there are some] big and ‘bigger’ vintages that handle oak, phenolics and power differently.
“Perhaps Grange’s silkier, ethereal demeanor may be re-awoken in vintages like 1996, 1999, 2002, 2004–albeit retrospectively after a few decades in the bottle?”
Without mentioning the stats on the ’04 Grange, Gago does point out that both special bins from that vintage–Block 42 and Bin 60A–“sit below 13.5 percent” alcohol. The goal Schubert set of 11.5 to 12 percent has risen, but not by much; Gago and his team “still strive for 13 percent or less–without any interference, in vineyard or winery.” Such a basic limitation contradicts the impression I have carried with me for years about Grange and the source of its power. It’s not alcohol that drives the best vintages. The stamina derives from the strength of the vines.
What was once an individual winemaking style has been adopted by any number of others, including some whose caricatures of Grange may tend to blur the distinctions that set it apart. Gago, charged with maintaining those distinctions, may be the most idiosyncratic chief winemaker at Penfolds since Schubert. He’s sensitive to Schubert’s legacy, and is now charged with sustaining it as the oldest wines begin to disappear.
For those of you with Grange in your cellar, or if you're looking to purchase older vintages, here are notes on the vintages presented at the Rewards of Patience tasting in Adelaide (September 2007).
Details on vintage conditions for older bottlings of Grange were sourced from Andrew Caillard, executive partner of Langton's Wine Auctions, Australia, who wrote up the fifth edition of Penfolds' Rewards of Patience tasting and will publish the latest results this year. I've rated the wines on a four-star scale; those without ratings are not recommended for purchase, most often due to the fact that they are past their prime.
denotes the best wines of the tasting
indicates great wines you will want to have in your cellar
are highly recommended wines that will offer exceptional drinking
are recommended as well made wines
Here’s a wine that coats every flavor receptor on the tongue, blankets them in black, then red spice and red fruit. It’s not as tightly built as some vintages; instead, it feels broader and more expansive, with more meat on the bone. The pure shiraz spice gives a bright, generous impression, the finish lasts on red fruit and spice in a beautiful open weave. At its peak now and through the next decade.