‘We are a young country,’ an Australian winemaker said to me recently, and it immediately sent a line of AD Hope’s famous poem ‘Australia’ ricocheting around my brain: ‘They call her a young country, but they lie’. The reality is that both are true at once, in wine as elsewhere: 500-million- year-old soils and a wine industry that has only really gained international attention in the past 50 years. My winemaker was talking about the adventurous spirit and lack of official strictures that give him and his neighbours such latitude to experiment.
Ancient whippersnapper is an interesting if not necessarily comfortable niche to occupy, and few people understand its possibilities as well as Peter Gago, chief winemaker of Australia’s most famous wine brand, Penfolds. One of the country’s oldest wineries – just eight years younger than its home state of South Australia – with a listing for its icon wines on the prestigious La Place de Bordeaux as of January 2024 and an expanding range of interests in vineyards across the world, Penfolds is both the birthplace of Grange, the country’s most internationally recognised wine, and the progenitor of Koonunga Hill, available in its thousands in a supermarket near you, for about £11.50. As it turns 180, an occasion the company is able to mark with its own brand of Champagne, two questions bubble to the surface: how has Penfolds got to where it is? And where on Earth – or perhaps earth, given its appetite for terroir – will it go next?
South Australia has some of the world’s oldest surviving vines, some of them owned by Penfolds. In late 2023, as the grapes swelled in southern-hemisphere vineyards, I visited them – carefully, because their great age is down to the state having remained phylloxera-free as the louse ravaged European vineyards in the late 19th century. Scientists did eventually figure out a solution, grafting the vines onto American rootstock, but the danger isn’t over for these gnarled and sturdy throwbacks, which are ungrafted. Like medieval cathedrals, they are relics of a vanished world, yet very much part of the present. Unlike cathedrals, they are more relevant than ever. There aren’t so many of us who want to worship as our predecessors did, but wine lovers are increasingly willing to genuflect before wines that those ancestors, if they were lucky, might have drunk.
The Kalimna vineyard, in the Barossa Valley’s northern reaches, was planted in 1888 by the Fowlers, grocers who made fruit preserves; they built the Kalimna Homestead, too. (Penfolds bought Kalimna from the Fowlers in 1945.) The name is an indigenous word for ‘beautiful’, and beyond the russet roof and cream wrought iron encircling the veranda, the lawn slopes gently towards vineyards fringed by trees and mown by sheep, as part of Penfolds’ sustainability efforts. The company’s target is to achieve net zero by 2030. Block 42, part of the Kalimna vineyard, is famous in its own right, thought to be the oldest continuously produced Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard in the world. The berries are small, the skins thick, the juice mere droplets – but what droplets! They go into Grange, Bin 707 and Bin 389 (every Penfolds wine has a bin number), flowing through the greatest Penfolds wines like lifeblood.
Barossa isn’t the only part of South Australia where history and Penfolds are intricately intertwined. The state capital, Adelaide, is partly built on what were once Christopher and Mary Penfold’s original vineyards, planted soon after they arrived from England. Those that remain are now Magill Estate, and it’s strange to see a vineyard with such a sterling reputation so close to the city. ‘Originally, all the hills behind us were covered in our vines,’ says Gago: Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvèdre. ‘Cabernet arrived in about the 1880s.’ The vines double as decoration for the estate’s restaurant, a magical room that sits among them enclosed in glass. From the vineyard, it seems to dematerialise – just a floating ceiling between you and the old buildings beyond.
Peter and I talked about his parents’ arrival in Australia as naive ‘ten-pound Poms’, lured from England by cheap tickets and the promise of sunshine. They probably had an easier time of it than the Penfolds, but still: 20,000km was bound to be a culture shock. ‘My mum was from the north; her family had been there since before Henry VIII. She’d never seen people who went barefoot in summer. She assumed she’d come somewhere so poor that the people couldn’t afford shoes!’ And that was the 1960s. What stories might Mary Penfold have told, fresh from life as a doctor’s wife in Brighton.
In any case, they bought 500 acres, and they prospered. Penfolds weathered many tribulations, some meteorological and some man-made. In those days, sunny Australia made mainly fortified wine, so in 1950, Penfolds’ chief winemaker Max Schubert went to Europe to learn about Sherry and Port. He squeezed in a detour to Bordeaux, where the likes of châteaux Lafite Rothschild and Latour treated him to seriously old wines, made before the world wars – dry wines that were still vibrant and delicious. He came home ambitious. If Bordeaux could make exceptionally long-ageing dry reds, why couldn’t South Australia?
Never mind that Bordeaux had been making wine since at least the 3rd century ce and had different soil types and weather conditions, to say nothing of a millennium of practice at making wines that thrilled the British. (I’m sure Schubert wanted to thrill the British. There was the old colonial pull – and besides, Britain had a lot more wine connoisseurs, because it had a lot more people. The population of the UK in 1950 was 50 million; Australia’s was 8 million.)
Schubert’s experiments resulted in a Shiraz-dominant blend, generally with a splash of Cabernet Sauvignon. His employers were horrified. It is a matter of legend now that the wine that became Penfolds Grange – Australia’s best known and most beloved fine wine – had to be made furtively, out of sight of the bossmen. When it finally saw the light of day, it was called Grange Hermitage: Grange after the cottage on the Magill Estate where the Penfolds had lived (and which is still there, complete with some of Dr Penfold’s original medical equipment), and Hermitage in homage to its mainstay, the great grape of the northern Rhône. At Magill Estate, where the 19th-century buildings behind the restaurant have been beautifully refurbished to showcase the company’s history, there are long glass cases of vintage after vintage of Grange – the ‘Hermitage’ was dropped in 1989, to the relief, presumably, of the French. If this is a young country, in white Australian terms, here the past is nevertheless carefully guarded, whether it’s a vine, a bottle signed by Schubert or a building that has been in use for well over a century.
Gago is a straight-talking Aussie, even if he was born a Brit. ‘I’m into wine not from the scientific perspective but from the geek perspective,’ he says. But he’s a very savvy geek. Under his guidance Penfolds, already famous, has become a phenomenon. The brand makes great blends – of varieties and terroirs – yet also releases impressive single-vineyard wines such as the Magill Estate Shiraz or the Cellar Reserve Chardonnay and even, on occasion, single blocks within vineyards, such as Kalimna Block 3C Shiraz or Kalimna Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon. ‘Undoubtedly across 180 years, Penfolds winemaking has been most strongly associated with blending,’ says Gago. ‘Yet we still value wines sourced from single vineyards. Paradoxically, many of these are still “blends” in a sense: small-lot ferments from across a vineyard, blended to optimise quality and reflect the terroir of that site.’ His philosophy is all-embracing: ‘Grapes are the progeny of soils, site and climate. They are our [blend] building blocks, offering a synergistic input into a wine’s desired structure and flavour, yet still maintaining their integrity and identity.’
Penfolds winemaking has been strongly associated with blending. Yet we still value wines from single vineyards
– Peter Gago
The philosophy might be broad, but the implementation is specific: blending, with this range of possible elements and the standards that Penfolds’ reputation demands, is very labour-intensive indeed. Yattarna, a top-tier Chardonnay from whichever cool-climate regions offer the year’s best grapes, is known as Bin 144 as a tribute to the 144 trials that were apparently required to get it right. And just when people had become used to this blend of terroirs in a super-premium white, Gago upset them all over again by combining five vintages of it and dubbing it V. Ask him why, and a glint appears in his eye. The son of a man who moved his young family 20,000km to an unknown continent because he had slept on warm beaches while serving in the British Army and wanted to live somewhere with a decent climate has clearly inherited his creed, which could be summed up as ‘Why not?’
Why not make a Cabernet in Napa Valley, or even a Cabernet and Marselan blend in China? Why not give Bordeaux or Champagne something to think about, by joining forces with a well-regarded incumbent – Dourthe in the former, Thiénot in the latter – and imprinting an Aussie brand on two of France’s most admired wine regions? There can be no such thing as spreading your brand too thin, when Gago himself appears to have mastered the ability to be on three continents at once. He tells me there is something else in the pipeline but won’t say what. Not England, my first guess. Maybe the Rhône, where the north is the ancestral home of Syrah and the south had mastered blending when the Peramangk, Ngadjuri and Kaurna people still had the Barossa to themselves? He won’t be drawn – ‘Watch this space!’ – but I feel able to speak for him when I say, Why not?
And despite all the jetsetting, the homelands are not neglected. ‘We are establishing a new viticultural region in Robe and returning to the red soils and limestone underlay of Wrattonbully,’ he says of two patches of South Australia that are yet to achieve international recognition. Adaptability is vital: ‘Penfolds has crafted many, many wines and styles over its 180 years. Some remain, some not. Our 2024 Penfolds Collection is testament to 18 decades of innovation and invention, hard work, trials, mistakes – and the honing of a Penfolds house style.’ Then there are the recorking clinics, where old bottles are carefully uncorked, tested and re-stoppered. Some have been lovingly guarded and are still beautiful (Gago recently tasted a 1953 Grange that was ‘immaculate’); some haven’t. There was the 1901 St Henri Shiraz used for many years as a doorstop; ‘and of course we’ve had more than one bottle of 1950s Grange inherited from relatives and uncorked for assessment that turned out to have been innocently refilled, many decades ago, with cold tea or coffee!’ And recorked? I’m not sure how innocent that can have been.
There can be no such thing as spreading your brand too thin, when Gago himself appears to have mastered being on three continents at once
Gago is 67, still moving fluidly between wine vats, airport lounges and the celebrity hobnobbing opportunities that come so easily when your flagship wine is Grange: I have never chatted to him without hearing at least one envy-inducing anecdote. (He can keep Prince Charles, as he then was, and Ed Sheeran if I can step into his shoes next time he’s backstage at a Springsteen concert.) He has been in charge since 2002 and never seems to stop working, even if he does make his work look effortless. At some point, he is going to be an exceptionally hard act to follow. Is there, I wonder, a designated follower? I can’t get a straight answer from Gago on this subject (‘Maybe 90 will be the new 60,’ he suggests, when I ask about Penfolds’ 200th anniversary and point out he’ll be pushing four score years and ten), although he does say there is a succession plan. But if he is elusive on where he might be in 2044, he is more expansive on his hopes for the company. ‘Ideally, our wineries in Bordeaux, California and China will be well established and running smoothly. Our vineyards across both hemispheres will be finely tuned and expertly managed. And in Australia (and elsewhere), our ways of dealing with climate change and other sustainability matters will be much more evolved, tested and finessed.’ Unimpeachable goals. I suspect Penfolds will also have a few interesting additions to that list, by the time it reaches 200 years young.
Three wines to try from the 2024 Penfolds collection
