Thiénot x Penfolds - Wine & Spirits Magazine

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Thiénot x Penfolds

by Joshua Greene • May 13, 2019

Peter Gago, chief winemaker at Penfolds, began his career in wine with a study at Roseworthy on how acidity impacts the development of “Champagne Character.” The project helped him land a job at Penfolds in 1989, making sparkling wine, including the Minchinbury Champagne, a historic label named for a winery Penfolds purchased in 1912.

Stanislas Thiénot(left) and Peter Gago

Stanislas Thiénot(left) and Peter Gago

Gago brought a photo of that 1912 Minchinbury Champagne to Paris this May, to rib his new partners as they release the first wines from Champagne Thiénot x Penfolds, a collection of cuvées grown, vinified and blended in the French region that now guards the trademark on its name.

The collaboration began to take shape soon after Stanislas Thiénot, whose father established a Champagne house in 1985, began importing Penfolds wines to France four years ago. Given Gago’s fascination with Champagne, it was only a matter of time before the two began planning a project. Gago, in fact, has long used the process of blending Champagne as a reference when describing the Penfolds “house style”—a term adopted from Champagne in which the chef du cave blends varied elements to achieve a consistent profile for the label.

Gago and the team from Thiénot, including Stanislas, chef du cave Nicolas Uriel and Laurent Fédou, chef du cave of Canard-Duchêne (another Champagne house owned by Thiénot), decided to focus on the 2012 vintage, creating a 2012 Chardonnay Pinot Noir Cuvée and two single-vineyard wines: a 2012 Blanc de Blancs from a half-hectare parcel of 50- to 70-year-old vines in Avize and a 2012 Blanc de Noirs from a one-hectare parcel of pinot noir in Aÿ. The 2012 Cuvée will be released on the US market by Treasury Wine Estates in June 2019, at a retail price of $200; the single-parcel wines will follow in 2020.

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Joshua Greene

Joshua Greene is the editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits magazine.

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David Paradela
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David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Editor and Publisher of Wine & Spirits since 1986, Joshua Greene began drinking wine with meals during a summer in Galicia, Spain, at the age of 13. In later years, he worked in wine shops in western Massachusetts and served as wine captain at Wheatleigh, a small inn in Lenox. After graduating from Princeton University in 1981, Greene pursued a career in magazines, focusing on the management of special-interest publications. His work with Wine & Spirits began on a consulting basis, eventually leading to his purchase of the magazine in 1989.

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After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.