Penfolds Australian Wine Tasting Featuring a Vertical of Grange going back to the 1990 Vintage!

"You have only so many bottles in your life, never drink a bad one."

Len Evans

We don’t waste time here at the Wine Watch as every day above ground should be special and celebrated with Great wines.  You never know when your last bottle will be but we are trying to take down as many great wines as we can before our time runs out!

One of the reasons that I get out of bed in the morning is to drink wines like Penfolds Grange. Grange is a symbol of the best that Australia has to offer, the pinnacle of quality and the epitome of what a Shiraz from southeast Australia is and standard bearer should be. That is why we host an annual event to showcase the newest release of this iconic wine. 

We had scheduled this event originally as a collector’s series tasting where your price of admission is a bottle of Grange but crickets… So, we have reworked this event and I have pulled a few older vintages of Grange from my cellar going back to 1990!  We will feature four other vintages of Grange along with a dozen other wines from Penfolds to make this an incredible evening of Penfolds wines.

The fee for this tasting which includes dinner is $295 + tax, for reservations call 954-523-9463 or e-mail andy@winewatch.com.  Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions or aversions when you make your reservations and chefs Toni and Dani will be happy to accommodate you.

Penfolds Australian Wine Tasting
With Special Guest Madelyn Reed
Saturday, November 4th
7:30pm

2020 Penfolds Bin 311 Chardonnay Australia
2022 Penfolds Bin 51 Riesling Australia
2020 Penfolds Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz Australia
2019 Penfolds Bin 600 Cabernet - Shiraz California
2019 Penfolds Cabernet Sauvignon Bin 704 Napa
2019 Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet – Shiraz Australia
2019 Penfolds Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon Australia
2018 Penfolds RWT Shiraz Australia
2019 Penfolds Bin 149 Cabernet Sauvignon Wine of the World
1990 Penfolds Grange Bin 95 Australia
2003 Penfolds Grange Bin 95 Australia
2014 Penfolds Grange Bin 95 Australia
2017 Penfolds Grange Bin 95 Australia
2019 Penfolds Grange Bin 95 Australia

Dinner Menu
Cheese and Charcuterie Selections
Grilled Octopus with kalamata olives aioli and Basil red onion relish
Iberico Pork Loin with Creamy Grits, and Shiraz Reduction
Australian Lamb Chops with Jalapeno Mint Jam and Blistered baby fingerling Potato
Dark Chocolate Creme Brulee

The dinner is $295 + tax, call 954-523-9463 for reservations or e-mail andy@winewatch.com.  Please let us know when you make your reservations if you have any food allergies or aversions and chefs Toni and Dani will be happy to accommodate you. 

A bit of history about Penfolds:

Penfolds, a household word in Australia and one of the world's largest wine companies, traces its origins back to Magill on the outskirts of Adelaide at the foot of the Mount Lofty Ranges.   It was at Magill that Dr. Christopher Rawson Penfold, the founder of this great firm, first planted his vineyard.  Dr. Penfold, the son of a Sussex vicar, the Reverend John Penfold, was schooled in England, and married his wife there in 1835.  However, within a few short years, he decided to try his hand at life in the colonies and purchased a grant of land at Magill in South Australia for what was considered a large sum of money.  With his wife and baby daughter, Georgina, he made the hazardous voyage towards the end of 1844.  The family settled on their land at Magill and built a white-washed stone cottage which they named "The Grange".  As well as practicing medicine and looking after his farm, Dr. Penfold planted vine cuttings which he had brought out with their ends dipped in sealing wax to keep the sap in the vines until they were planted.  He did not approve of the quality of imported wine of the time so he made his own for use of his patients with anemia.  Whether the wine was in fact any help to anemia is debatable, but this now discredited cure was the beginning of a huge enterprise.  By the time of his death in 1870, Dr. Penfold had expanded his viticultural holdings and devoted more and more time to winemaking.  In his twenty-six years in the young colony, Dr. Penfold had laid the basis of a veritable viticultural dynasty.

 Although the wine business at Magill seemed to falter slightly after Dr. Penfold's death, by 1881 it was again flourishing; and Penfolds was becoming the most important wine producer in South Australia.  Historical records reveal that the stock of wine at the Magill winery in 1881 was about 485,000 liters.  At that time the total quantity in South Australian was about 1.4 million liters.  Wine production continued to increase, and by 1885 trade was flourishing between Magill and all the states as well as New Zealand.  One of Dr. Penfold's four grandchildren, Frank Penfold Hyland (born 1873), was responsible for guiding the company through almost fifty years of successful expansion.  Frank entered the business in 1892 and spent three years in Europe studying winemaking.  After Frank's death in 1948, at the age of 74, the company was administered by a Board of Directors for some fourteen years before it became a public company in 1962.  Expansion continued throughout the sixties and seventies with the most significant expansion occurring in 1982 when Penfolds acquired the Kaiser Stuhl winery.  Throughout the eighties Penfolds continued its aggressive expansion, swallowed up the huge Seppelt winery, and was said to control nearly 40% of all Australian wine production.  Also in 1988, Penfold's flung its far-reaching tentacles abroad and purchased half of Sonoma County's Geyser Peak winery.  Magill is still the headquarters of the Penfolds organization, but their winery at Nuriootpa is the major production facility.  The "Grange", the family's small old white-washed stone cottage, is still maintained at Magill in its original condition and is used as a museum.  Today Penfold's is a huge and successful enterprise.  Indeed, a great deal of wine has flowed since Dr. Christopher Rawson Penfold began to cure his anemic patients at Magill.