Custodians of a great treasure in the world of wine

While some philosophical minds continue to ask themselves whether time is fluid, in the Barossa Valley proof exists that history can be liquid.

Fiona Donald is chief winemaker at Seppeltsfield, which has just released its 1924 Para Vintage Tawny, with a price tag of $1750 for a 100ml bottle. Picture: Ben MacMahon

While some philosophical minds continue to ask themselves whether time is fluid, in the Barossa Valley proof exists that history can be liquid.

This week, as in every year since 1978, a wine emerged from the sturdy stone cellars of Seppeltsfield that has waited a century to once again see the light of day.

The release of the 1924 Seppeltsfield Para Vintage Tawny – with a price tag of $1750 for a 100ml bottle – is a promise kept to the past, the fulfilment of a vision held by a man who knew he’d never be around to see it.

To celebrate the opening of a grand new fortified cellar at the family’s Seppeltsfield estate in 1878, Benno Seppelt set aside a puncheon (500 litres) of that vintage’s finest tawny port, with the instructions it be left untouched until it was released to celebrate the building’s centenary.

The process has been repeated every year since that first barrel was set aside in 1878, and released in 1978, creating what is believed to be the longest unbroken run of currently accessible vintages of any wine in the world.

The 1924 released this week, a wine harvested and fermented just a matter of weeks after the death of Vladimir Lenin, continues the tradition behind Australia’s most unique wine.

It’s also the most expensive, being more than 13 times the price of Penfolds Grange or Henschke’s Hill of Grace per millilitre.

Even then, it barely breaks even. For Seppeltsfield’s owner, Warren Randall, this annual release is an obligation to history, not his accountants.

“We’re custodians of one of the greatest treasures in the world of wine,” he says. “The responsibility to maintain that isn’t something you just record on a spreadsheet.”

Those bean counters are well aware of the financial perversion in releasing a wine that loses through evaporation some 3 per cent of its volume each year for a century, the so-called “angel’s share”, but the intensification delivered by the passage of time presents other ­issues as well.

There’s a physicality to the wine all its own. It flows like treacle. If you were to pour into a normal wine glass the kind of modest serving its intensity, and cost, might suggest, its viscosity would gum it against the glass long before it reached your lips.

For the first time, Seppeltsfield has collaborated with Austrian glassmaker Riedel to find a vessel to best pull focus on 100 years of vinous history. The unanimous choice was a small, tulip-shaped glass, the Riedel Vinum Cognac Hennessy Glassware, originally designed for the finest cognacs. “The thin tulip-shaped nature of the glass allows the wine a very small evaporation surface,” said Riedel’s managing director Australia and New Zealand, Mark Baulderstone.

The angels have stolen enough of this precious liquid. They can damn well leave some for us.