Penfolds Grange 1973 (1x 750mL), SA. Cork

From humble beginnings in the 1950s, Grange has maintained its place as Australia's most prestigious red wine over five decades. Today, it is a wine of international renown, with each vintage eagerly awaited by collectors both in Australia and overseas.

Penfolds Grange is a wine of extraordinary dimension and power. Richly textured, intensely concentrated and packed with fruit sweetness, these wines, regardless of vintage, require medium to long-term cellaring. They develop into immensely complex, beguiling wines that seduce the senses.

An Australian icon, Grange represents a tradition in winemaking that is totally uncompromising. Grange has bypassed the fads and trends of modern winemaking in the sense that it has maintained an integrity of style and remained true to its origins in the mind of Max Schubert. Penfolds Grange is the quality standard against which all other Australian red wines are judged. To share a mature Grange, 15 to 20 years old, in fine condition, is one of the great wine experiences.

Chris Shanahan, 26 May 2010, The Canberra Times“It has an inky deep colour, overwhelming aroma and flavour impact of ripe, dense, sweet fruit, mouth-flooding tannins, distinctive flavour of American oak and a buoyant lift. This is a great wine of rare dimension. Over many decades, it will mellow and grow paler, becoming more fragile and ethereal.”

Penfolds Bin 95 Grange

The wine market was changing rapidly by the late 1940s, as soldiers returned from the war and new immigrants settled in Australia. Max Schubert, then a young winemaker at Penfolds, returned to Europe after the war to investigate winemaking. The mission was to learn about sherry production, however a side trip to Bordeaux led to Schubert experimenting with a long-lived red wine that he called Grange.

Schubert looks back on the 1950s Grange years as exciting years of discovery, faith, doubt, and ultimately triumph. In contrast, the 1960s were a period of vindication and Grange stole a march on the rest of the Australian wine industry by setting an incomparable benchmark for longevity, concentration and balance.

Penfolds Grange is Australia’s pre-eminent first growth. It is a very perfumed concentrated wine, which combines the intensely rich fruit and ripe tannins of shiraz with the fragrance and complementary nuances of new, fine-grained American oak. Partial barrel fermentation takes place at the tail-end of primary fermentation. It weaves the two elements together producing a meaty complexity and roundness of flavours on the palate.

A portion of cabernet sauvignon is used in some years to enhance the aromatics and palate structure. After vindication the wine is matured in new American oak hogshead for around 20 months. The best vintages last for more than 50 years.

Top Vintages

2010, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2002, 1999, 1998, 1996, 1991, 1990, 1986, 1980, 1976, 1971, 1966, 1963, 1962, 1955, 1953. The experimental and hidden Granges are extremely rare