Penfolds has launched a Grange blended with a French wine

Australia’s most prestigious and exalted wine will be blended for the first time in its 74 year history with a French wine and is yours for only $3500 a bottle. Get in fast!

Winemakers Peter Gago from Penfolds and Caroline Frey from La Chapelle with the new Grange La Chapelle.

Penfolds will release a new blended version of its celebrated Grange that intertwines French syrah and Australian shiraz, reuniting the two distant terroirs that share a common ancestry in a limited edition Grange blend that will sell for $3500 a bottle.

Anointed as Grange La Chapelle 2021, it marks the first time Grange, the winemaker’s most exalted and expensive wine, has been equally blended with a brand outside of the Penfolds family and was born from a longstanding friendship between Caroline Frey, chief winemaker and vigneron at La Chapelle, and Peter Gago, chief winemaker for Penfolds.

It also further expands the international reach of Penfolds, owned by Treasury Wine Estates, with Australia’s only truly luxury wine brand recently launching a Penfolds sourced from grapes in California, a Champagne from France and a Penfolds made in China.

Caroline Frey and Peter Gago launch the new Grange La Chapelle 2021.

Launched in France overnight, the new Australian-French Grange blend is being touted as a new wine that will showcase what this varietal can achieve aromatically and structurally - as the winemakers harness different geographies, terroirs and winemaking cultures.

The maiden Grange La Chapelle 2021 is made up of 50 per cent La Chapelle, France, from the winery’s picturesque and sunny slopes of Hill of Hermitage, and 50 per cent Grange made from a collection of select South Australian vineyards: Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale and Clare Valley.

The Penfolds team led by Mr Gago believes Grange La Chapelle perfectly knits together the attributes of French syrah and Australian shiraz, wine expressions that share a common ancestry but which have evolved into distinctive styles from their respective terroirs - in Australia and France. It also reunites him with a longtime friend and fellow winemaker with both bringing their skills to the table to produce something special.

“When things are real, all quickly becomes self-evident … this friendship created an idea, this idea became a trial, the trial became a wine. Who would have thought,” said Mr Gago.

“The blend’s raison d’être: One variety - reunited, reinterpreted, reassembled.”

La Chapelle winemaker Caroline Frey and Penfolds winemaker Peter Gago at the La Chapelle winery.

Mr Gago has been a longtime friend of Ms Frey, a giant of the French wine industry whose handful of family owned vineyards in France and Switzerland is highly respected and followed by wine lovers. La Chapelle, owned by the Frey family alongside Château La Lagune, Domaines Paul Jaboulet Aîné, and Château Corton C, is an esteemed 26-hectare vineyard on the Hermitage Hill, renowned for producing some of the world’s finest wines.

“My attachment to this vineyard is sentimental,” said Ms Frey. “Every person who climbs the hill to La Chapelle, following in the footsteps of the Chevalier de Sterimberg who settled there in the 13th century, cultivated the vines, and gave his name to the Hermitage appellation, feels the emotion and energy of this legendary place.

“For nearly 20 years, we have been working to sustain a unique heritage with humility and passion, revealing the genius of this timeless place.”

Grange La Chapelle 2021.

Despite their great physical distance from each other and vastly different histories, Penfolds and La Chapelle have crossed paths before. This includes a La Chapelle and Grange tasting organised by the Institute of Masters of Wine a number of years ago and in 1987 a lunch in New York co-hosted by then La Chapelle owner Gerard Jaboulet and Australian wine pioneer and creator of Grange, Max Schubert, where they poured the 1971 Penfolds Grange and 1978 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle.

This connection between the two celebrated wine houses has now come full-circle with the creation and release of Grange La Chapelle.

While this is the first inaugural vintage release, Penfolds plans to have an annual release - weather permitting - with the Grange La Chapelle 2022 bottled and a 2023 vintage currently in the barrel.

However, the new Grange blend will be in such small allocations that it won’t feature behind a glass cabinet in the local Dan Murphy’s or on the shelf at a corner bottleshop. Only 18 wine merchants from around the world have been personally invited by both teams to hand sell Grange La Chapelle to their private customers and in Australia sales of the blend - which will retail for $3500 in Australia (France €2,600) - will be handled directly by Penfolds as traditional retailers are bypassed.

The Grange La Chapelle is the first time that Grange has been blended with another wine outside of the Penfolds family.

Treasury Wine has ambitiously expanded the Penfolds family of wines in recent years to embrace grapes and winemaking outside of its spiritual home in South Australia. In 2023 it launched its first China-sourced wine in the 2023 Penfolds collection called CWT 521 which is a blend of cabernet sauvignon and marselan sourced from Shangri-la in the southwestern province of Yunnan, and Ningxia, in the country’s central-north. In 2024 Penfolds unveiled a new Champagne Cuvée Brut in collaboration with Champagne Thiénot. It also has a Californian Penfolds range.

The Penfolds division in 2024 generated $1bn in net sales revenue for Treasury Wine Estates and $421.3m in earnings, up 15.5 per cent, with the company tipping low double-digit earnings growth in fiscal 2025.

Treasury Wine Estates is slated to release its half-year results on Thursday.