I recently attended a tasting of new vintages of Penfolds wines led by the winery's chief winemaker, Peter Gago. Penfolds, which is based in Australia's Barossa Valley, has four wines in the LCBO (all reviewed today) and another two at Vintages Essentials. Others appear regularly in Vintages releases, Vintages "Classics" releases, and at other times. They include Penfolds Grange, a shiraz that's Australia's most famous wine.
The 2002 Grange (it's 99 per cent shiraz and one per cent cabernet sauvignon) will be offered in November's Vintages "Classics" catalog, where it will sell for $320 a bottle. That's a bit rich for most of us, but the good news is that Penfolds produces high-quality, very good value wine across the board.
In fact, the Penfolds outfit is impressive across the board. As central as the wine is to the winery, it's also the most public part of a more general high-quality enterprise. For example, Penfolds has its own cooperage where barrels are assembled (from imported oak), repaired and generally looked after to ensure the quality the winemakers want. (Peter Gago works with a team of winemakers.)
Another example: Penfolds holds regular recorking clinics around the world. Collectors who own older bottles of Penfolds wines (usually 15 years or older) can take their wines to the clinic where the cork will be examined to see if there are signs of leakage or imminent leakage. If necessary, the bottle is opened, the wine tasted, topped up, then recorked and a trademark red capsule added.
All this is to ensure that wine lovers and collectors (not always the same thing) can cellar their Penfolds wines over the long term at minimal risk of cork-related damage. There's no charge for this service.
Then there's Peter Gago (pronounced gay-go) himself, one of Penfolds' great assets. He's not only chief winemaker but the company's genial global ambassador. He punctuates his conversation with references to a tasting in Moscow, a dinner in Tokyo and a recorking clinic in New York. He's rare among winemakers in giving wine writers all the factual information they want, plus additional material, in an organized and coherent way.
And he's enthusiastic about his work. Sometimes I feel sorry for winemakers who have to give us wine-scribblers the same information time after time. But with Peter, whom I've met half a dozen times in Australia and Canada, you'd swear he was tasting and talking about his fine wines for the first time every time. He's so unlike some brand ambassadors whose cadence and tone make it obvious that they've gone through their paces so many times they could do it in their sleep (and might be doing just that as you watch them).
There were about 10 writers at this tasting in Toronto. At the end of it, a colleague turned to me and said, "He's amazing. You get so much more from him than you do from anyone else."
You could almost say it applies to his wines, too.
Four Penfolds wines today, all from the excellent-value Koonunga Hill line.