Penfolds offers a check-up for old bottles
WATERS ON WINE
For the past 25 years, Australia’s Penfoldswinery has offered its customers a chance to have their older wines checked by its winemakers. Since 1991, the Red Wine Re-corking Clinic has been staged in select cities where any Penfolds red wines 15 years and older can be evaluated in a face-to-face meeting.
The free service will be held Friday in Vancouver, following Recorking Clinics held in New York and Miami. More than 130,000 bottles across four continents have been checked to date.
Penfolds Chief Winemaker Peter Gago says the service benefits both collectors and the winery. Customers get to find out what condition their older wines are in and gain insight into when to drink them. The winemakers get to see older wines — in some cases, experimental or one-off bottlings they didn’t even know existed — and see how the wines are evolving.
Gago, who is the fourth chief winemaker at Penfolds since 1948, says he loves to ask customers why they haven’t drank the wine yet. He explains he and his fellow winemakers hear two common refrains.
“I’ve often heard, even from billionaires, ‘I can afford to buy it, but I cannot afford to drink it,’ ” he says. A single bottle of an early vintage of Penfolds Grange, which was first made in 1951, can fetch more than $100,000 at auction.
People also often say they’re saving these rare old wines for the right occasion. Gago’s light-hearted response? “Don’t let your kids drink this at your wake!”
Customers book into the recorking clinics at penfolds.com, letting the winery know what they are bringing. Guests have turned up with one bottle and as many as 180, as was the case earlier this year at a clinic in Adelaide, Australia. One Penfolds winemaker spent an entire day sorting through the selection.
Winemakers will look at the condition of each bottle, especially concerning themselves with the fill level. They will only open a bottle if the level is too low or shows signs the cork has leaked.
Once opened, the wine is blanketed by argongas to limit exposure to oxygen. A small sample is poured and evaluated by the winemaker before being shared with the owner. If the wine is sound, the bottle is topped up with the current vintage of the same wine. (Clinical trials by the winery show the addition of two percent or less of a new wine doesn’t noticeably affect the aroma and flavour of the older wine.)
The wine then gets a new branded cork andhas a sticker affixed to the bottle certifying that it had been through the re-corking clinic and was assessed to be of top quality. Each wine has a unique number that’s logged into a database kept by the winery.
Wines that don’t pass muster receive a white dot. They might be oxidized from improper storage or musty due to a bad cork. If the level of the wine is deemed too low, it won’t be certified because it would require too much new wine to bring it back to a normal fill. Suspect bottles are re-corked and sent home with their owners.
This week’s recommended wines promise to besuitable candidates for Penfolds Re-corking Clinics in the future, if you havethe patience to leave them undisturbed long enough. Part of the newly released bin wines from Penfolds, the 2014 Coonawarra Shiraz will be turning up on store shelves in the coming months. A nice counterpoint to the rich and rewarding Kalimna Shiraz, this expression is more spicy and polished. The cool climate character lends a fine personality to a wine that’s drinking nicely now and has the capacity to cellar for 10 or more years.