Mark Another One Off the List: Penfolds Grange
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there are certain great wines that I’m never going to taste. We just don’t travel in the same circles. Expecting to meet-up with, say, a bottle of Chateau Petrus is, for me, every bit as realistic as expecting to bump into Cary Grant at the grocery store. Given that Grant is dead and Petrus is $5,000 a bottle, the odds either way are against me.
Every now and then, however, life throws you a curve. I had dinner with Sir Edmund Hillary once, for example, which was about as cool as it gets and completely unforeseeable. Milton Berle told me a joke standing at a deli cash register. Tina Louise flirted with me.
It happens, once in a while, that a normal person encounters a legend — but it is best not to count on it, because life isn’t like that.
So it is with my list of impossible wines. They are there, and I am here, and seldom the twain shall meet.
Last week, without warning or forethought, I was invited to a tasting of Penfolds wines that included three vintages of the legendary Grange. The tasting was at Westport Whiskey & Wine, and standing at the front of the room was Steven Leinert, Penfolds’ senior red winemaker. Right there on the table were three decanters filled with different vintages of one of the wines I never figured I’d taste.
And let me tell you something: I don’t remember the joke Milton Berle told at the cash register, because it wasn’t that funny. Sir Edmund Hillary was a genial old man with some good stories and bad breath. And Tina Louise’s flirtation had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her own need to be the center of attention. In short, legends are, beneath it all, just people.
And Grange is just wine. Pretty good wine, sure: complicated, subtle, distinct. But in the end, even at $500 a bottle, just wine. Perhaps it would be more if I knew it better. It has been said that you don’t really know a wine until you drink six bottle of it, and I will almost certainly never drink six bottles of Grange.
But the lesson I’m taking away from my encounters with legends of all types is they are best revered from a distance. Wine is no different from people, and I’m not enough of a connoisseur of either to really understand, when I’m standing right next to them, what it was that I had been so in awe of.
Tasting notes below:
2004 Grange — Dark ruby to the edge. Big nose: oak, pepper, maybe a little mint. Very complex and intricate. Medium/high acidity, medium tannins. There’s a flavor in there like sweet mustard, with a long clean finish of cherries and charcoal smoke. The word that comes to mind is “composed.” This is a very composed wine.
2005 Grange — Darkest ruby leaning to black. Rich, deep, heavy nose with oak and a whack of alcohol. Chocolate on the palate, and sharper acidity than the ’04. If this were a blind tasting I’d argue it’s a little out of whack, but since it’s Grange I’ll keep my mouth shut. The long finish has more acidity in it than I’d prefer.
2006 Grange — Dark purple that coats the glass. The nose is slightly smoky. Medium acid, med/high tannins. A well balanced wine that is so, so young. The long nice finish is cherries and chocolate and a touch of youthful herbaceousness.
The rock star of the tasting was, for my money, the NV Grandfather Tawny, a solera-aged Shiraz/Cab/Mourvedre/Grenache fortified wine that was amazing. It was all bright cherries and roasted nuts, old and new at the same time, with perfectly balanced sweetness and a finish that is what I wish the whole world tasted like. It’s about $100 a bottle and worth every penny.
September 21st, 2011 at 11:06 AM
With you Tom – I haven’t rubbed shoulders with celebrity that much (I did sit next to Cliff Robertson on a plane once – in coach) but I have been blessed with opportunities to taste some highly sought after wines over the years. Without exception they have disappointed, and not because I had unrealistic expectations.
September 21st, 2011 at 11:09 AM
Don’t know that I’d pay $500 for a bottle of Grange, even if I was to br drinking it with Tina Louise. Cool that you got to try it, though perhaps somewhat disappointing that the reality couldn’t live up to the legend. Like you say, best appreciated at a distance.
Pasted from my Wine Philosophy page: “If a wine requires that the drinker be experienced and knowledgeable in order to enjoy it, then maybe it really isn’t that good.” Also: “Price matters.”
I paid $500 for my first car. Drove that thing everywhere. It was far more than transportation; it symbolized the rewards of hard work and discipline…freedom on four wheels yielding a million memories and smiles, even if it only lasted about another ten thousand miles.
This reverie came rushing back to me in a flood of shame after spending more than $500 on a case of wine once. Everyone’s got their own formulae for value and worth and neither are transferable. I don’t know what yours is, but I won’t be doing that again. But that’s a different topic and now I’m just rambling.
PS – That Tawny sure does sound delish.
September 21st, 2011 at 2:56 PM
This is one of the differences between the Aussies and the rest of the world. Like you, I’m not a candidate to taste most of the world’s great wines. But when the Grange people were in Dallas, they let me taste. And they were nice about. Made jokes about it.
Can you imagine a $500 California winemaker doing that?
September 21st, 2011 at 7:02 PM
One doesn’t need 6 bottles to get to know a wine, one needs 6 bottles to give him time to convince himself that the wine was really worth the price.
Oh, and had that been Mary Ann that flirted with you, I’m quite sure it would have been totally worth it.
September 23rd, 2011 at 8:35 AM
Tom knows me. He knows I’m a jerk about many things but wine isn’t one of them. I approach wine directly and honestly with no tolerance for poseurs and unwarranted hype. The bottle of ’82 Margaux that we opened for our mortgage payoff was one of the most dissapointing bottles I’ve ever had. Not much different than Mouton Cadet. But I’ve been lucky to have had legendary wines that far surpassed any expectations I had for them. ’67 d’Yquem, ’59 DRC Richebourg, ’57 La Tache, 1919, ’53 and ’82 Gruaud Larose, ’74 Phelps, ’83 La Mouline, ’74 Matha’s Vyd and at least a dozen more. Each of these wines was a transcendent experience. First and foremost, delicious. Overwhelming complexity with subtle flavors evolving over minutes. The finish of these wines were dreamlike versions of the wine done as a shadow-play, ephemeral flavors appearing and changing at the edges of perception.
The unifying factor, besides being universally acknowledged “great wines” was maturity. Wines built to age are not mathematicians or musical prodigies. They don’t amaze when not fully mature. 10, 15, even 20 years are not enough for some wines and you are left looking at the glass and trying to devine the elements that will perhaps someday make it “great.”
I am truly sorry you haven’t had one of these transcendent wines. The experience adds depth and color to my enjoyment of both my everyday wines and my special bottles. It is the reason that wine isn’t just a pleasant beverage. It is a “big deal.” Millions can stand in front of Monet’s Haystacks or Picasso’s Guernica and feel the realiztion that these are not just pictures, but transcendent art. Sadly, great bottles are practically one-offs, available only once to a small audience of the fantastically wealthy, the compulsively committed, or in my case, the undeservedly fortunate. If there were any guarantee of the experience I would skip my everyday stuff for months and spend the $1000 on a bottle to get my fix. Alas, no guarantee and no wine insurance. But don’t give up the search for perfection and a transcendent experience. Don’t give up on wine as art rather than mere craft.
September 23rd, 2011 at 8:39 AM
Wally, that was poetic. Guernica indeed. I’m going to steal that.
September 23rd, 2011 at 8:43 AM
Sorry to go on but. As I tasted an 1861 Cossart Madiera I felt the rumble of cannons across the Atlantic as they fired on Fort Sumter at budbreak in April. I have tasted the glorious, hot days and gentle rains of that amazing Bordeaux summer of 1919 . 75 years gone by and the fruit tasting as if it were picked yesterday.
Thank you for this thread. Thank you for reminding me why I do what I do despite labels with chickens and marsupials and wineries like ravenswood turning into corporate shelf-fillers.
September 23rd, 2011 at 8:57 AM
Dear Curmudge (may I call you Curmudge?)
I have always said that when I retire my next career will be International Art Thief. Think Steve McQueen in the Thomas Crown Affair meets Cary Grant in It takes a Thief. But art, not cold, lifeless stones and metal. Are you in for the Browning at the Rim Gang? I think we will be headquartered at Monte Argentario on the Tuscan coast so the yacht can come and go unobserved by Interpol.
September 23rd, 2011 at 9:58 AM
Curmudge is fine, though I’m more of an urban guy — Chelsea or the George Cinq would be nice.
September 23rd, 2011 at 10:25 AM
First, don’t sell yourself short, Walt. You’re a jerk about wine, too.
And second, I have often used Picasso metaphorically about wine, myself, but in a different way: to show the need to understand more about the wine than the bottle in front of you. In tasting something like Grange, a weakness of my opinion is that I haven’t had enough experience with the wine to understand the consistent thread that defines it. It may be possible to feel the emotion of Guernica without ever having seen another Picasso, but the experience gains depth with an understanding of what the artist did before and after, and knowledge of his visual grammar.
I am not without transcendent wine experiences; I just haven’t had them with “great” wines and would argue that context also played a part in that transcendence. A bottle of Puligny-Montrachet with crabcakes in Maryland; a Georges de Latour in a roadhouse in Florida; a shameless Paul Hobbs Beckstoffer To Kalon, dissected with a couple of wine buddies sitting at a bar.
The larger point, which I haven’t well articulated because I’m still working it out, is that there are different measures of wine. Transcendence is an individual experience; one person may be moved to tears by Schubert’s Ave Maria, another by Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue.
But there is a touchstone quality to certain wines, that is a function of terroir and tradition. It makes those wines eternally significant, and when you layer-in the element of time — of vintage — those wines are transcendent in another way. They transcend notions of good or bad in either relative or absolute terms. Sinatra and Tony Bennett are both great singers, but Sinatra is different. The same goes for wine.
I believe, without a lot of evidence or experience to back it up, that those touchstone wines are important, a part of the grammar and culture of wine that, odds are, I will never understand, because my experience with them will be too limited. My few moments with them are incredibly valuable, even if not transcendent. They are points of reference on the great map of wine, a little more of the intricate picture filled in.
I just didn’t feel any rumbling cannons, and wonder a little bit if maybe what you were experiencing was less emotional connection than indigestion.
September 23rd, 2011 at 11:07 AM
Amazingly delicious is the standard. Iwas at a birthday party where a friend opened up bottles of ’70 Haut Brion for his white zinfandel-swilling nurses. They didn’t know that it was rare or expensive, they only knew they didn’t like red wine until that moment. Picasso’s Guernica was perhaps the wrong exa
September 23rd, 2011 at 11:23 AM
mple for me to use because it is not intuitively easy to understand. The Haystacks illustrate the point much better. With no understanding of wine and no prompting from the studio audience the nurses recognized the Haut Brion as delicious and profound.What I’m saying is that it is not the taster and their depth of understanding about wine. Most tasting of “great wine” resembles the Emperor’s naked stroll down main with everyone commenting on the wine’s structure or concentration rather than how damn delicious it is. It is the wine that is “art”, easily recognized and easily appreciated even by those not among the cognoscenti. These are the bottles I hope you all get a chance to try at least once.
September 23rd, 2011 at 11:26 AM
“wonder a little bit if maybe what you were experiencing was less emotional connection than indigestion”
Hah! you won’t get a rise out of me on this subject- this is the core and essence of why I’m really happy to go to work each day and until people stop attempting to make beautiful wine, my belief is unassailable.