Penfolds name on everyone’s lips

TREASURY Wine Estates is taking its famous Penfolds brand global, launching a range of Californian-made reds, a French-made champagne and a fortified wine infused with China’s most popular spirit.

The Melbourne-based company says expanding Penfolds beyond its Australian winemaking roots will position the 174-year-old brand — most famous for Grange — for its next phase of growth.

Penfolds will begin making a range of red wines at wineries owned by Treasury in California’s famed Napa Valley region. The first of the US wines are slated to hit the market in 2022, Treasury announced yesterday.

The plan to produce wine in the US comes five years after the listed winemaker had to destroy product when exports of low-end brands failed to win over wine drinkers there.

Penfolds will also produce champagne — to be made in the French winemaking region of the same name — under a new “special bottlings” division.

Its bubbly will hit the market next year as Penfolds marks its 175th anniversary.

Other special-bottlings offerings include a 28-year-old single batch brandy, which went on sale yesterday for $425 a bottle.

A premium fortified Barossa shiraz laced with the Chinese spirit baijiu is set to hit the market in September at $150 a bottle. Baijiu, China’s national liquor, is a clear, fiery spirit made from sorghum, rice, wheat or corn.

The move to appeal to Chinese drinkers comes as wine exports to the world’s second-biggest economy surge.

Australia’s wine exports to mainland China surged 63 per cent to a record $848 million last year, figures from industry group Wine Australia show.

China’s growing taste for more expensive wines has also seen it emerge as Australia’s biggest market by value, accounting for 33 per cent of total exports in dollar terms.