Penfolds Bin 95 Grange 1998
Style: Red Wine
Varieties: Shiraz (97%), Cabernet Sauvignon (3%)
Closure: Cork
Penfolds Bin 95 Grange 1998
Camberwell
Burke Road
Camberwell VIC 3124
Australia
Producer: Penfolds
Country: Australia
Region: Multi Regional SA
Vintage: 1998
Critic Score: 99
Alcohol: 14.5 %
Size: 750 ml
Drink by: 2040
Penfolds Rewards of Patience tasting panel 2021 - 5/5 rating
Penfolds Bin 95 Grange Shiraz is Australia's most famous wine with a reputation for superb fruit complexity and flavour richness. It is the most powerful expression of Penfolds multi-vineyard, multi-district blending philosophy and is officially listed as a Heritage Icon of South Australia. One of the world's great wines.
"Profoundly concentrated but velvety-smooth and seamless; impressively muscular and thickly coated with oak, and bound by drying, astringent tannins. Without question the most concentrated Grange of all time, utterly steeped in blackberry flavors; a real show pony." Jeremy Oliver
The 1998 Penfolds Grange is a blend of 97% shiraz and 3% cabernet sauvignon from premium vineyards in the Barossa Valley, Magill Estate and Padthaway. The wine was matured for 18 months in American oak hogsheads (100% new).
"Bright, almost impenetrable dark red. Nose: The nose is youthful and intense with dark, ripened Satsuma plum fruits rising above a base of liqueured dark chocolate and licorice. Overtones of malt, toasty barrel ferment and nutty oak meld effortlessly into an exquisitely aromatic offering. Palate: The palate displays intense layering of fruit - raspberry, blackcurrant and blackberry - laced with licorice and oak. The power of the fruit at the fore is balanced with ripe velvety tannins, offering an alluring even-textured palate with remarkable length." Peter Gago - Penfolds Chief Winemaker
"Deep crimson. Intense dark plum, mulberry, blackberry, roasted chestnut, tobacco, chinotto and liquorice notes. Inky deep with mulberry, black cherry, blackberry and chinotto fruits, fine loose-knit chalky textures, attractive mid-palate density and dark chocolate and mocha oak complexity. Finishes chocolaty with a long tannin plume. Superbly balanced with sweet ripe fruit, perfectly attuned oak, integrated tannins and acidity. Supple and seamless in structure. A great Grange vintage. Drinking well, but will improve with time. Peak drinking now to 2055.
Vintage Conditions: Cool spring weather followed by a warm summer and very low rainfall created one of the classic vintages of the last two decades. Fruit quality was outstanding with incredible intensity of flavour, fine tannins and structure. The 1998 vintage of Penfolds Grange may rank amongst the very finest released." Penfolds
Expert reviews
"Deep crimson. Intense dark plum, mulberry, blackberry, roasted chestnut, tobacco, chinotto and liquorice notes. Inky deep with mulberry, black cherry, blackberry and chinotto fruits, fine loose-knit chalky textures, attractive mid-palate density and dark chocolate and mocha oak complexity. Finishes chocolaty with a long tannin plume. Superbly balanced with sweet ripe fruit, perfectly attuned oak, integrated tannins and acidity. Supple and seamless in structure. A great Grange vintage." Penfolds Rewards of Patience tasting panel 2021 - 5/5 rating
"The 1998 Grange will be legendary. A blend of 97% Shiraz and 3% Cabernet Sauvignon, it tips the scales at a whopping 14.5% alcohol. The inky/purple color is followed by an extraordinarily intense nose of creme de cassis intermixed with blueberry and floral notes. As the wine sits in the glass, aromas of meat, plums, and cola also emerge. It is a seamless effort with sweet tannin, well-integrated acidity, sensational extract, and layer upon layer of blackberry and cassis fruit that stain the palate and fill the mouth. Its harmony, freshness, and remarkable length (the finish lasts nearly a minute) suggest an all-time classic. Anticipated maturity: 2006-2030." Robert Parker, Wine Advocate - 99 points
"Superbly balanced with sweet ripe fruit, perfectly attuned oak and integrated tannins and acidity. Supple and seamless in structure. Drink Now-2055" Andrew Caillard MW, The Vintage Journal Verticals Penfolds Grange 2022 - 98 points
"The temptation must have been to create a monster and while there's plenty of weighty, black, aniseedy fruit here, the salaciousness is entirely less aggressive than you'd expect. In short, it's curvaceous but considered; it's full of saturated, plummy fruit that somehow has proven almost totally porous to the best-ofthe-best new American oak it's been matured in. At this early stage complexity is no great issue and yet there's an array of fruit flavours already showing: bright, crushed cranberry, dense blackberry, licorice, raisons, woodspice and a hiss of blueberry, with a spit-and-polish of sweet smoky milk chocolate flavour carried throughout. It's like a bigger version of the 1998 St Henri, with oak a lot less prominent than you'd expect – it's a seriously mouthwatering wine, oozing power and intelligence. Drink: 2012-2026." Campbell Mattinson, Winefront Monthly – 98 points
"Very deep red-ruby. Smoky, deeply concentrated fruit bomb of a nose: blackberry, dark plum, cassis; creamy vanilla and lightly toasty coconutty oak; and ethereal background notes of white pepper, smoked meats, musky spices, tar and licorice. Profoundly concentrated but velvety-smooth and seamless; impressively muscular and thickly coated with oak, and bound by drying, astringent tannins. Without question the most concentrated Grange of all time, utterly steeped in blackberry flavors; a real show pony. It's also the most alcoholic Grange ever made, and at a declared 14.5% does taste warm and spirity - the first Grange to do so. It also ventures to some degree into the realm of currant and prune. No doubt a brilliant wine, but only time will tell if, with its elevated alcohol and its superripe flavors, this 1998 version ranks with the very best Grange vintages." Jeremy Oliver, Vinous – 97 points
"The hype and astronomic auction prices for the Imperial bottles of this great wine are already part of history. Deep purple-red, it oozes blackberry, blackcurrant and licorice from every pore, the palate a sumptuously smooth velvet cushion of small black fruits. It will outlive anyone who can afford to buy it. Best Drinking: 2010-2040." James Halliday, Halliday Wine Companion - 97 points
"A wine of surprising subtlety for the vintage, playing its ripe cherry, red plum and herb flavors against firm tannins that have a bit of grit to them. But those lively cherry and raspberry flavors burst through, and there's a nice hint of green herbs lingering around the finish, which doesn't subside easily." Harvey Steiman, Wine Spectator - 97 points
"Untold wealth is required to acquire this wine since Robert Parker gave it '99/99+' No one could fail to admire this wine, which in this particular vintage contains about three per cent of the Cabernet Sauvignon Penfolds found most remarkable from the 1998 vintage. It's extraordinarily concentrated in every way (although it failed to line the glass with purple as young vintage port does – a phenomenon I remember from my first acquaintance with young Grange in the mid-1980s). The colour is as brash as squashed elderberries. The nose is extraordinarily deep, dragging you in to its intensity, and with a strong lifted/volatile element (not to the point of a wine fault but certainly noticeable). Then on the palate there's a round sweetness that makes it almost unctuous. The level of acidity (7.2 in tartaric apparently; pH 3.5) is quite remarkable – verging on painful – but the considerable tannin charge of this wine is almost abscured by the sheer mass of all that concentrated ripe fruit. I found the finish a little bit hot though the wine is 'only' 14.5 per cent alcohol, I'm told. So, yes, like most vintages of Grange, I admire this wine – indeed I admire this particular vintage more than most. But I have to say I would never buy a bottle. Its price relative to the purity of pleasure it gives this particular palate just doesn't make sense. I relish every chance I get to taste Grange but find myself exhausted rather than delighted by drinking it." Jancis Robinson MW – 18/20 points
Awards
Penfolds Rewards of Patience tasting panel 2021 - 5/5 rating
The story of grange
1931
In a sign of Max Schubert's determination to make his mark on Australia's wine industry, he did whatever he could to get his foot in the door at Penfolds, joining the company as a messenger boy in 1931. By 1948, at the age of 33, Max Schubert became Penfolds first Chief Winemaker.
1950
In the latter part of 1950, Schubert was sent to Europe to investigate winemaking practices in Spain & Portugal. On a side trip to Bordeaux, Schubert was inspired and impressed by the French cellared-style wines and dreamed of making 'something different and lasting' of his own.
1951
Back in Adelaide, in time for the 1951 vintage, Max Schubert set about looking for appropriate 'raw material' and Shiraz was his grape of choice. Combining traditional Australian techniques, inspiration from Europe and precision winemaking practices developed at Penfolds, Schubert made his first experimental wine in 1951.
1957
Max Schubert was asked to show his efforts in Sydney to top management, invited wine identities and personal friends of the board. To his horror the Grange experiment was universally disliked and Schubert was ordered to shut down the project. What might have been enough to bury Grange in another winemaker's hands, only made Max more determined to succeed.
Late 20th Century
Max continued to craft his Grange vintages in secret, hiding three vintages '57, '58 and '59, in depths of the cellars. Eventually the Penfolds board ordered production of Grange to restart, just in time for the 1960 vintage. From then on, international acknowledgment and awards were bestowed on Grange, including the 1990 vintage of Grange which was named Wine Spectator's Red Wine of the Year in 1995.
Today
Grange's reputation as one of the world's most celebrated wines continues to grow today. On its 50th birthday in 2001, Grange was listed as a South Australian heritage icon, while the 2008 Grange vintage achieved a perfect score of 100 points by two of the world's most influential wine magazines. With every new generation of Penfolds winemakers, Max Schubert's remarkable vision is nurtured and strengthened.
The following text is taken from an article by Ken Gargett in Quill & Pad, https://quillandpad.com
Grange is one of the best-known stories in Australian wine, always worth recapping, especially as a bottle of the very first vintage, 1951, sold at auction last month for AUD$157,624. Not bad for a wine that was never released commercially – it was simply considered an experiment at the time and is apparently only just this side of undrinkable these days.
Grange had an unlikely genesis. Penfolds' head winemaker back in the late 1940s was the legendary Max Schubert. In those days, the market was very much focused on fortifieds, with table wines a distant second. Schubert made several visits to Spain and Portugal to study fortified making, but he had a strong interest in table wines and on the way home he ducked up to Bordeaux for a few days.
Schubert was blown away by what he saw there and returned determined to create an Australian "First Growth." Of course, easier said than done.
The first problem was funding it, though his employers were largely supportive of his experiments provided they did not get in the way of his real work – which in those days was very much on various fortifieds rather than table wines. First Growths tend to be heavily Cabernet Sauvignon dominant with varying amounts of other varieties, especially Merlot. Well, in the late 1940s, early 1950s in Australia, good luck finding much of either, especially Merlot, at the level of quality Schubert required. What we did have, in abundance, was Shiraz. At this stage, Shiraz was dominant even in regions that would become so famous for Cabernet such as Coonawarra.
In addition, First Growths spent time maturing in new French oak. At that stage, American was the oak most commonly found in Australia; there was simply not the quantity or quality of French oak available. So new American it was. While First Growths (indeed, all the top Bordeaux) were from single estates, Australia was all about blending, not only vineyards but regions.
So, the result would be a wine made mostly from Shiraz – only a few Granges over the years have been 100 percent Shiraz, most having a small percentage of Cabernet. It would be sourced from a wide range of regions and matured in new American oak. It has ever been thus.
So nothing at all like a First Growth then, but it started a line of wines that have long been generally considered as Australia’s finest. Personal preference might take one elsewhere and there are a number of exceptional contenders. But Grange has the runs on the board.
The first Grange, an experimental wine, was the 1951 and Penfolds has never missed a vintage since then. The first intended for commercial release was the 1952. Schubert’s intention was a wine that could match great Bordeaux in aging ability, so it was into the cellar with the first vintages for as long as he could get away with. After some years, he finally brought them out for a tasting for the Penfolds hierarchy (Penfolds headquarters was situated half a continent away in Sydney so the daily goings-on at Magill were of little interest). But as Schubert said, that hierarchy had become "increasingly aware of the large amount of money lying idle in their underground cellars at Magill."
To say the unveiling was a disaster of near Biblical proportions would be an understatement. The wines were hated, even ridiculed.
Schubert was devastated. He was inordinately proud of these wines, believing them to be exceptional. The tasting included vintages 1951 to 1956. The wines were treated with contempt. One well-known expert's assessment was, "Schubert, I congratulate you. A very good, dry port, which no one in their right mind will buy, let alone drink." Another compared them to "crushed ants."
Yet another thought he’d take advantage of the situation and offered to take a few dozen off Schubert's hands, but he expected them for free as he thought them not worth any money. One wanted some for use as an aphrodisiac, believing the wine to be like bull’s blood, hence something that would, "raise his blood count to twice the norm when the occasion demanded." A young doctor requested some as an anesthetic for his girlfriend (the mind boggles as to why this was required – and given his position as a doctor, why he did not have access to something more suitable).
It is worth noting that wines like 1952, 1953, and 1955 are now considered to be some of the greatest ever made in Australia. The 1951 is now little more than a curio and I doubt anyone is paying AUD$150,000 for the pleasure of drinking it. It is for collectors only.
After the debacle, the order came from Sydney: "Cease production."
Despite knowing full well that defiance of such instructions would end his career, Schubert was so convinced as to the ultimate quality of these wines that he ignored the directive. From 1957, he made the wines in secret. Of course, this meant that he could not add the usual quantities of new oak to the budget among other things – there is only so much you can hide from bean counters, even long distance. But the wines were made and hidden away in the depths of the cellars under false names and records. This gave us the "hidden Granges" of 1957, 1958, and 1959.
At the time Penfolds still had stocks of the early Granges and little idea what to do with them. Schubert entered them in shows – wine shows are very important to the Australian wine industry. Not surprisingly, they started to not only win medals but to dominate the shows. Naturally, this caught the eye of the hierarchy, and the decision was made to reverse the earlier edict. Schubert was instructed to recommence production. I can find no record of the reaction by the Penfolds board when it discovered that he’d never stopped, but I would love to have been the proverbial fly on the wall.
About the winery
After the success of early sherries and fortified wines, founders Dr Christopher and Mary Penfold planted the vine cuttings they had carried on their voyage over to Australia. In 1844 the fledging vineyard was officially established as the Penfolds wine company at Magill Estate.
As the company grew, so too did Dr Penfold's medical reputation, leaving much of the running of the winery to Mary Penfold. Early forays into Clarets and Rieslings proved increasingly popular, and on Christopher's death in 1870, Mary assumed total responsibility for the winery. Mary's reign at the helm of Penfolds saw years of determination and endeavour.
By the time Mary Penfold retired in 1884 (ceding management to her daughter, Georgina) Penfolds was producing 1/3 of all South Australia's wine. She'd set an agenda that continues today, experimenting with new methods in wine production. By Mary's death in 1896, the Penfolds legacy was well on its way to fruition. By 1907, Penfolds had become South Australia's largest winery.
In 1948, history was made again as Max Schubert became the company's first Chief Winemaker. A loyal company man and true innovator, Schubert would propel Penfolds onto the global stage with his experimentation of long-lasting wines - the creation of Penfolds Grange in the 1950s.
In 1959 (while Schubert was perfecting his Grange experiment in secret), the tradition of 'bin wines' began. The first, a Shiraz wine with the grapes of the company's own Barossa Valley vineyards was simply named after the storage area of the cellars where it is aged. And so Kalimna Bin 28 becomes the first official Penfolds Bin number wine.
In 1960, the Penfolds board instructed Max Schubert to officially re-start production on Grange. His determination and the quality of the aged wine had won them over.
Soon, the medals began flowing and Grange quickly became one of the most revered wines around the world. In 1988 Schubert was named Decanter Magazine's Man of the Year, and on the 50th anniversary of its birth, Penfolds Grange was given a heritage listing in South Australia.
Despite great success, Penfolds never rests on its laurels. In 2012 Penfolds released its most innovative project to date - 12 handcrafted ampoules of the rare 2004 Kalimna Block Cabernet Sauvignon.
Two years later, Penfolds celebrated the 170th anniversary – having just picked up a perfect score of 100 for the 2008 Grange in two of the world's most influential wine magazines. Today, Penfolds continues to hold dear the philosophies and legends – '1844 to evermore!'.
South Australia
South Australian is responsible for more than half the production of all Australian wine. It is home to more than 900 wineries across 18 wine regions. The regions are Adelaide Hills, Adelaide Plains, Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, Coonawarra, Currency Creek, Eden Valley, Kangaroo Island, Langhorne Creek, McLaren Vale, Mount Benson, Mount Gambier, Padthaway, Riverland, Robe, Southern Fleurieu, Southern Flinders Ranges and Wrattonbully.
Many of the well-known names in the South Australian wine industry established their first vineyards in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The first vines in McLaren Vale were planted at Reynella in 1839 and Penfold's established Magill Estate on the outskirts of Adelaide in 1844.
South Australia has a vast diversity in geography and climate which allows the State to be able to produce a range of grape varieties - from cool climate Riesling in the Clare and Eden Vallies to the big, full bodied Shiraz wines of the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale. Two of Australia's best-known wines, Penfolds Grange and Henschke Hill of Grace, are produced here. There is much to discover in South Australia for the wine lover.