Penfolds offers wine that’s from nowhere
As strange as it may sound, the most important thing about a wine is not always how it tastes.
Oh, a good wine has to be pleasing. It ought to refresh, invigorate and intrigue. As French winemakers love to say, the best wine is the bottle that’s empty after a meal.
That’s often enough. But the best wines do even more than that. They speak of their place of origin.
Through the medium of fermented grape juice, great wines express their terroir, that mystical French term that encompasses the soils, climate and weather, elevation, angle of inclination and the human activity behind it all. Wines that can do this are said to have a sense of place.
Although a sense of place has always been an important quality in a wine, it has perhaps never been as highly valued as it is today.
Determining whether a wine possesses a sense of place is not an easy, intuitive task. It requires no small amount of experience and expertise to distinguish, for example, a Barolo displaying the aromatic elegance characteristic of grapes grown in the La Morra zone from another showing the combination of power and finesse typical of a Barolo from Serralunga d’Alba.
Experts are able to sense the divergent nuances in the wines. For the rest of us, it’s possible with experience but not always easy.
Although a sense of place has always been an important quality in a wine, it has perhaps never been as highly valued as it is today. All over the world, wine regions have increasingly, if often unofficially, adopted the
model of Burgundy, the region that more than any other has institutionalized the primacy of place.
Avid consumers have joined in. It’s not uncommon to hear wine lovers debating not just the qualities expected of particular vineyards but the fractional differences found within different sections of a single vineyard.
Given the generally shared esteem for wines that express their terroirs, Penfolds, the big Australian producer, positioned itself robustly against the tide this year when it rolled out its California Collection, a series of four wines in which Penfolds ventured to the United States to offer its interpretation of California wines.
This company not only took a stab at making wine in a new place; in two of the wines it actually blended Australian wine with wine from California. Each of these cuvées was labeled “Wine of the World.”
One, Penfolds Bin 149, combines Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon with cabernet from South Australia. The other, Quantum Bin 98, adds South Australian shiraz to a base of Napa cabernet.
In a world that cherishes wines with a sense of place, are these wines of no place?
In an email from Australia, Peter Gago, Penfolds’ chief winemaker, said that over its nearly two centuries of history Penfolds had evolved from single-vineyard to single region, multiregion, multistate and now multicountry.
“Each and every style has been honestly supported and protected,” he says. “Ideally our multiregional blends assemble building blocks off distinctive local plots, each one bringing something unique to the blend. Each contributes to exceeding the sum of the parts — inputting complexity, brightness, layering, linearity, tightness and ideally a propensity to mature and age gracefully in bottle.”
Gago has always combined a relentlessly experimental approach with exacting standards. Nonetheless, a bicontinental blend is a huge leap in the annals of fine wines. Plenty of wine companies have taken on the challenge of new terroirs overseas without creating international blends.
Champagne producer Louis Roederer started Roederer Estate in the Anderson Valley of California decades ago. Château Lafite-Rothschild has properties in South America and in China, and the Robert Mondavi Winery had joint ventures on multiple continents before the company was sold to Constellation Brands in 2004. Penfolds itself is collaborating with a French company to release a Champagne and has owned vineyard property in California since 1988.
Indeed, Penfolds is part of Treasury Wine Estates, a global company that is based in Australia but owns properties in New Zealand, the United States and Italy as well.
Nothing to brag about
Combining wines from different countries or continents has been done before, but historically it was nothing to brag about. In the 18th and 19th centuries Bordeaux or Burgundy producers sometimes surreptitiously bolstered their bottles in wan vintages with darker wines from Languedoc, Spain, Italy or Morocco.
These “amelioration techniques” were dishonest and fraudulent, as the producers tried to pass off their blends as Bordeaux or Burgundy.
Penfolds, of course, is doing nothing of the sort. It’s transparent with its marketing and “Wine of the World” labeling.
And with suggested retail prices of $149 a bottle for the Bin 149 and $700 for the Quantum Bin 98, it places premium value on these wines. It even enlisted NBA star Ben Simmons, who plays for the Philadelphia 76ers but was born in Australia, as a celebrity endorser.
In a sense, Penfolds is sticking to its company ethos. While it does make single-vineyard wines, like its Magill Estate shiraz, which convey a sense of place, its flagship wine, Grange, is a blend of shiraz from multiple vineyards in different geographical areas. It sells for around $700 a bottle, too. Yattarna, its top chardonnay, which sells for around $120, is a blend from four different Australia states.
The art of blending, of putting together different grapes from different sites, has long been a crucial component of winemaking. Perhaps no place made a virtue of it like the big houses of Champagne, which through the 20th century played down the importance of vineyard site and terroir and instead celebrated the know-how of the cellar master, who would blend wines made from different grapes grown in different places and harvested in different vintages to create a seamless expression of the house style.
But even Champagne caught the terroir bug. Over the last 20 years, rising interest in small growers who produce their own Champagne has galvanized a close examination of the terroirs of Champagne. Even many of the big houses that emphasized blending have added single-vineyard and village-focused wines to their portfolios.
Nonetheless, some of the most prized Champagne brands, like Dom Pérignon and Krug, persist in emphasizing the blended style.
Easily recognizable
Penfolds, as the big Champagne producers once did, speaks more of its house style and cellar methods than of farming and vineyard dirt.
“Each of our wines bears that Penfolds Stamp,” Gago says, “styles that are immediately recognizable, styles that sit comfortably no matter the portfolio positioning, pricing or pedigree.”
People around the world embrace the Penfolds approach to wine. That’s why they pay the big bucks for Grange. Will they for Quantum Bin 98? Critics gave the 2018, the first vintage, top scores and raves. (Gago said the Bin 98 would continue to be part of the Penfolds annual portfolio, so we’ll see how future vintages are priced.)
I confess to not having tasted either Wine of the World. But I’ve certainly enjoyed glasses of aged Grange on the rare chances they have come my way, and even more so bottles of St. Henri, a sibling and stylistic inverse of Grange that is a lot more affordable.
Wines like these will always have a place in the world. They are delicious drinks, made with skill and ingenuity. I will also confess to preferring wines with the stamp of place on them.
Yes, I get a thrill drinking a bottle Krug or
Dom Pérignon. I recognize and applaud their achievement. But given a choice I would opt for a single-vineyard Champagne from Ulysse Collin or Jérôme Prévost over either, sheerly for the emotional pleasure that comes from knowing I can walk among the vines that produced these wines, run my hand through the dirt of the vineyard, and breathe in the ambience and atmosphere of the place that gave rise to them.
Burgundies that bear the regional stamp Bourgogne, made from grapes grown anywhere within Burgundy, can be wonderful. They are often bargains relative to the skyrocketing prices of Burgundies from more specific sites.
Yet I am almost always willing to pay more for village wines, a full step up in Burgundy’s hierarchy of terroir, for the intellectual pleasure of associating aromas, flavors, texture and body with a specific place.