Penfolds Grange 2004 (South Australia)
$600, Cork, 14.3%
Now here is a challenging wine to review. The reviewers are swooning, the faithful are lining up at the Magill cellar door, even the mainstream press is giving it coverage (great to see, more please). In short, it is a ‘loaded’ wine: A bottle of fermented grape juice that comes so full of preconceptions, myth & mystique that actual tasting notes are redundant with reviewers serve to only agree or disagree with the greatness.
So, at first, I thought I would just not score this, to be a self righteous knob and just rattle off some descriptors and the odd opinion, before leaving a hole where the score would be at the end. But, instead, I sat there trying to work out what, if anything, was wrong with it. Approach a tasting with the idea that all wine is perfect until proven not. Its actually great fun, but also seems counter intuitive with the whole critical tasting idea. In the end, I decided that if you were to hold up a wine as the model for The Ultimate Young South Australian Shiraz, you couldn’t really go wrong with this.
Purple, dark red in colour. Sweet, malted coconut oak, interwoven with really bright red fruit, like a raspberry bounty & just a smidgen of (classic for Grange) VA. Cocoa. Black fruit. Impossibly youthful. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the 2005 Moss Wood on the nose, with it’s surreal, sweet youthful fruit and oak amalgam. Its a purity of fruit and well judged oak at its zenith, and its hard not too love. I think, however, that as a young wine, many European palates would find this too sweet. Leave it for a decade before serving it to the Poms then.
On the palate, well, it is drier, deeper and blacker than the sweet nose, much like 70% dark chocolate. Palate wise its red/black fruit dominant and utterly Penfoldian in its firm, quit sweet tannins. It’s sweet, but so structured and balanced that it feels velvety. Velvety like Burgundy. Effortless softness that is so seductive that you don’t notice the tannins, even though they hang in the background, ready to kick. I think that’s called balance. And it makes this wine the hero that it’s purported to be.
So in the end, in my quest to examine this wines perfection credentials, I really couldn’t find much wrong with it. Perhaps its a bit too sweet, otherwise it really is a brilliant South Australian Shiraz. The only question, perhaps, is whether it is ‘that much’ better than the 04 St Henri. And that question is largely answered by your wallet…19.3/97
7 Comments
Just as ever with the myths….we have so many here….
My question is….is it worth the price ??? Sometimes you find wines 10 times cheaper, and not 10 times “less” good !
I had the point with a Vega Sicilia Unico 1987 recently, absolutely fabulous wine, but I now well some Ribera del Duero around 20 Euros, that’s 30 bucks I guess, as Vina Sastre Crianza, and they are just almost as good….and Vega Unico is 250 E in a shop, 350 Au$ ?
Stan (the french wine man)
Value is in the eye of the beholder. Or at least thats the theory. In practice, its a near perfect bottle of red. And near perfection is bound to be expensive.
Put more simply, if I had the cash, I would be buying without hesitation.
I have just been given a bottle of this, can you assist me in a cellaring time?
That's an easy one. In a good cellar this will live for a very long time. In 20 years time, this will still be drinking well, and probably for many years after that. Balance is impeccable, structure is all there.
Saying that however, I would have no qualms about drinking this immediately – just give it a few hours in the decanter – as this Grange is already a fine drink.
So to come to some sort of absolute drinking window I'd say ideally drink this from 2014-2034
Oh dear.
Drank a bottle of this, out of the bottle for my 30th.
Now feel terribly guilty, and at the same time, pleased with my indulgence.
At least everyone had a nip..
Hi,
For future reference, 'alot' isn't a word, you wouldn't write 'alittle'. Also, if you mean to say 'it is', it's 'it's' not 'its'.
Kind Regards,
Grammar Nazi.
Cheers Grammar Nazi,
Clearly too much time on your hands, but thanks anyway.