Dazzling releases true to Penfolds heritage
Philip White picks some of his favourites from the new Penfolds release – and, yes, there’s a Grange among them.
Penfolds Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling 2015
$30; 11.5% alcohol; screw cap; 92+++ points
It’s cruel to offer the novice explorer of the world of Penfolds an introduction like this at $30. While a ravishing beauty to sniff, in the mouth department, the wine is typical High Barossa stone: as austere and tight-lipped and close-knit as some of those old households in the ranges.
But the bouquet is indeed just that: a bunch of flowers. It’s thick with the aromas of fleshy white petals like the magnolia and jasmine, with some delicate lime blossom and the pith of its fruit. If you could make a luxury bathroom cosmetic that smelled like this, I imagine you’d be very successful.
At first gulp, in bright contrast, you’re all a-pucker. It’s like licking the slaty doorstep or the walls of a Lutheran church: stony of texture and steely of resolve. It is classic high country Riesling, guaranteed to live for many years beneath its reassuring closure. That’s all abruptly obvious.
Then as the flavour receptors acclimatise, shards of acidic fruits begin to emerge: tight lemon and hints of gooseberry; even oxalis. It’s a severe rinse that turns the salivaries all a-gush, and had my lot dribbling for fat chicken stewed in Kiwi Savvy-B with white onions, heaps of garlic and lots of fresh tarragon.
Otherwise, like most of Penfolds’ very best, it’s for the cellar. Look again in six years.
Penfolds Bin 311 Tumbarumba Chardonnay 2014
$40; 12.5% alcohol; screw cap; 94+ points
The Immediate Gastronomic Delight Graph makes a perfect meeting with the Spend Curve in this bonnie Rumba. I think it’s the best-value adventure in the whole dazzling release.
While it has the classic butterscotch and cinder toffee wave, with grilled cashews and citrus rind, and some white kassler or goose fat, in its style it’s still more along the lines of ripe Chablis than full-blown Burgundy.
You might like
It’s very, very fine and poised, and tickled my hooter with a brisk maritime/dunal grasses edge.
It exercises the mouth just enough to make the lips smack: the cool-region natural acid is just right.
Try it as a between-meals drink, elevenses or fourish. Sit and ponder and marvel with crumbly apple streusel from a good German baker.
Tasting the new releases at Penfolds Magill Estate. Photo: Philip White
Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2012
$100; 14.5% alcohol; screw cap; 95+++ points
One of the true stars of the release, this is right back on Max’s track. Which is the track of John Davoren and Edmund Mazure before him: winemakers who determinedly invented and developed this soulful old style of red, with 13 months in big 50-plus-year-old oak vats instead of sappy, expensive, small-format modern oak.
The stern reds of 2012 can be so taut and withdrawing that many of the better ones are droll in their youth. Here, the old-style winemaking has softened and opened the heart of the year, putting it on a plate as much as a tasting glass: it’s soft and genteel and warming and always perfectly polite.
I think that in recent years the inclusion of larger parcels of Robe fruit had focused St Henri in a leaner, less soulful and hearty way than in this determined return to style: this model shows more of the reassuring warmth and generosity – even calm sensuality – of the Barossa and McLaren Vale base wines.
As history has shown, a St Henri made as well and carefully as this will live for extreme periods in the right cellar: Penfolds chief winemaker Peter Gago says 2045 is not an unrealistic opening date for this vintage.
Still, a proper decanting sees the wine react beautifully to oxygen even in this, its extreme youth: it’s already disarmingly luxurious and soothing. It’d do wicked stuff to a dribbling aged pepper steak with mashed potato and parsnip and a stack of beefy field mushrooms.
Penfolds Grange 2011
$785; 14.5% alcohol; cork; 93++ points
2011 was the trickiest year: rains at vintage saw much beautiful fruit fall to botrytis, much after the thunderstorm style more common in, dare I say, Bordeaux, and to lesser degree, the Rhône.
So Gago and his team faced a difficult problem: sourcing fruit for a wine of such lofty provenance would have been beyond winemakers without that amazing library of great vineyards that Penfolds can access.
Most of this fruit came from the old rocks and bits of calcrete in the red loams of the north western Barossa: the eastern slopes of the Nain Hills of Greenock.
Stay informed, daily
As Gago puts it with typical candour: “Such tough conditions required tough decisions in the vineyard, at the fermenter, in barrel, on the bench … at half its average total volume it’s a real Grange in the 1974 and 1983 style … we had nowhere to hide … is it one of the best Granges ever? No. Is it one of the finest reds from the South Australian 2011 vintage? Yes … but it’s not trying too hard to be something it isn’t.”
It’s nowhere near as complex and confounding as, say, the 2012 is certain to be.
The wine is very well formed and less angular than most baby Granges: the winemakers have worked wonders getting that traditional new American oak to withdraw to the point where it’s barely discernible among that much softer-than-usual fruit syrup.
In which sense it’s more of a St Henri in style. After half an hour in the decanter, sensual flesh and saucy, cheeky aromatics begin to emerge – soft licorice and sarsaparilla roots, for starters – but the whole thing stays in balance, slightly sullen and reluctant, but supple and right up the comforting line that Max called “Motherly”.
I’d be giving this one a nudge in about five years, but it’s not about to fall over. Ten or 20 more is well within its calm, quiet reach.
Gerard Jaboulet once sent me to his favourite country restaurant, somewhere on the humid flats of the Rhône delta, where its alluvium spreads at the end of its gorge. He insisted I drink his legendary 1978 La Chappelle with his recommended dish. A large flat white plate emerged, bearing a thin layer of green lentils cooked in pork stock with little lumps of belly flesh and softened skin, slices of carrot and fresh truffles. A grind of black pepper set it dancing.
I ate it with a spoon.
This Grange would fill that role with gentle antipodean authority. Where’s Gerard and Max when you need them?
Prices are from the Penfolds cellar door website.
drinkster.blogspot.com
