Tasting to die for rewards the patient type

Penfolds’ eighth edition of The Rewards of Patience is a roadmap to our best wines.

James Halliday tastes a Grange at Penfolds Magill Estate.

In total silence in the majestic Mill Room at Adelaide’s Magill Estate, a dozen internationally renowned oenophiles, vintners and wine scribes are methodically working their way through the world’s most entertaining quality control exercise.

The total value of the wines being tasted?

“Oh, you don’t want to know,” Penfolds chief winemaker Peter Gago told The Australian yesterday, having spent the morning working his way through the back catalogue of Australia’s most celebrated wine, Grange Hermitage, starting with its first commercial release from 1952, the year after its invention by Max Schubert.

The tasting comes ahead of Penfolds release of the eighth edition of The Rewards of Patience, the book Gago describes as “the road map” to what are rightly regarded as Australia’s best wines.

The book, which has now been translated into Mandarin, has become a global bible for wine devotees, and is reissued every five or so years, hence the opening yesterday of the most valuable wine collection in Australia.

Aside from the 1952 Grange, dozens of other Granges were also tasted, along with several vintages of the St Henri Shiraz and a number of stellar, super-rare drops from Penfold’s Bin collections, including the 1962 Bin 68, regarded as the best wine ever made in Australia.

The 1962 Bin 68 was the only Australian wine to make the top 10 in Decanter magazine’s list of 100 wines you must drink before you die, coming in at No 7 alongside the 1900 Chateau Margaux and 1945 Mouton Rothschild. A bottle sets you back $20,000.

The content for The Rewards of Patience is prepared by assembling a who’s who of international wine making and wine writing, with a dozen tasters silently working through brackets of wine, and reflecting in hushed tones and comparing notes when they’re done.

This is no pick-and-tick exercise, though.

They are deliberately harsh about the staying power of their product as they set drinking windows for their wines, and have no qualms about declaring a wine to be on its last legs or even dead.

“We are brutally honest,” Gago says.

“If something is past it, we are warts and all.

“It’s the old, old saying, in vino veritas, in wine there is truth, so if a wine hasn’t stood the test of time, we say that.”

And while what this reporter knows about wine could be written comfortably on the end of a cork, I did drink half a glass of the 1952 Grange, and wept quietly on the way back to the car.