Another Penfolds legend in making

Every new vintage presents winemakers with opportunities requiring grasping and disasters needing dodging.

Penfolds’ 2016 Bin 111A Shiraz from the Clare and Barossa valleys.

Every new vintage presents winemakers with opportunities requiring grasping and disasters needing dodging.

It is the essence of the winemaker’s art and craft, shaping something memorable and profound from what the season has deigned to provide.

Experience and intuition are key tools, the ability to look at a harvest and see the cues provided by those that came before.

That’s how you make wines that reflect the unique character of a vintage but sit within a broader framework of a recognisable house style.

That methodology is arguably more firmly entrenched at Penfolds than any other Australian winemaker.

For Peter Gago and his red winemaking team at Penfolds, there’s a complex mental matrix in play that looks at fruit from multiple vineyards across multiple regions — and the ferments they become — and even at this early stage start to make calls on which labels will be the ultimate destination.

So is a parcel of shiraz destined for Grange, or is it more in the St Henri style? Has a vineyard produced cabernet sauvignon fruit with the distinctive characters that mark Bin 707, or is more in line with Bin 407?

It requires a pretty tight focus on the patterns of the past.

But what happens when something comes along that’s out of the box, something that grabs the attention but defies compartmentalisation?

In the case of Penfolds, it’s when the rare and celebrated Special Bin Wines are born.

The Special Bin lineage stretches back to the 1950s and it has always been the home for wines that have changed the Penfolds paradigm in some way.

They are wines born from an enduring philosophy of experimentation and exploration, and on the infrequent occasions they are commercially released they invariably become vinous legends. These are wines such as the mythologised 1962 Bin 60A Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon, Barossa Shiraz, generally recognised as the greatest wine made in this country, or the Block 42 Cabernet Sauvignon, released only six times in seven decades.

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A Special Bin release is always notable, and the latest in the line-up, released in conjunction with celebrations for Penfolds 170th birthday, is just that.

The 2016 Bin 111A is a blend of shiraz from two vineyards, one in the Clare Valley, the other in Penfolds traditional heartland, the Barossa.

The Botanic Vineyard is between the Clare Valley townships of Auburn at Leasingham and its fruit has made the final blend of five of the last six Grange blends.

The Gersch Vineyard, in the Barossa’s Moppa sub-region, celebrated a century of continuous supply to Penfolds this year.

Earlier this year, Penfolds purchased the Botanic vineyard, marking a significant re-entry into the region after selling off its Clare holdings more than a decade ago.

It was consistently producing fruit of the highest quality, but in 2016 that fruit was a little different, had a different bearing and stance.

It made Gago start thinking ‘‘Special Bin’’.

“It was a different expression from Botanic in 16,” says Gago. “More evocative than the muscular character we usually see.”

So, faced with exceptional fruit that just didn’t fit the stylistic mould for Grange, Gago and his team looked for the other elements that might help deliver a wine of Special Bin standard.

It’s a process Gago describes as “waiting for the cream to rise, then skimming it off the top”.

“But it’s a never a matter of stealing Grange parcels,” he adds.

That counterpoint came in the form of deeply flavoured, generously structured old vine shiraz from the Gersch vineyard.

The result is a wine worthy of its place among the best Special Bins.

2016 Bin 111A Shiraz, Clare and Barossa valleys, $1500

The first thing that strikes you with this wine is its utter completeness, its high definition resolution, its intriguing depths.

It’s driven by dark fruits and Dutch licorice, ironstone and slate, with a dusting of dark chocolate and baking spice.

It explodes on the palate, a wine determined to occupy every available space, but it’s momentum is remarkably smooth and sustained. No element overrides another. It’s perfectly harmonious.

This is one of the most significant wines to be released this year, a legend in the making.