There are wineries that make great wine. And there are wineries that change the way a country understands itself. Penfolds is the second kind.
From a doctor's stone cottage in the Adelaide foothills to the cellars of the world's most serious collectors, the story of Penfolds spans nearly two centuries of ambition, defiance, and quiet brilliance. At its centre sits one bottle: Grange. Australia's most acclaimed wine, its only Heritage Icon, and, had history turned out differently, a wine that would never have existed at all.
The cottage called The Grange, 1844
Dr Christopher Penfold and his wife Mary arrived in South Australia in June 1844, disembarking from the Taglioni at Port Adelaide after a voyage from England during which they had carefully tended vine cuttings brought from France. They purchased 500 acres of land at Magill, at the foot of the Mount Lofty Ranges east of Adelaide, and built a small stone cottage on the estate. They called it The Grange. It is the name that would, more than a century later, be given to the most consequential wine Australia has ever produced.
Christopher was a physician with a firm belief in wine's medicinal properties. He planted the French vine cuttings, established a winery, and produced his first wines as tonics — prescribed to patients suffering from anaemia and other conditions. Mary ran the vineyards and much of the winemaking operation while her husband devoted his time to his growing medical practice. When Christopher died in 1870, she assumed total control, blending wines under her own judgement, expanding production, and steering the business through the remainder of the nineteenth century with a precision that contemporaries reported with admiration. By the time of her retirement in 1884, Penfolds owned approximately a third of all wine stores in South Australia.
It was, by any measure, a formidable foundation.
Max Schubert and the Bordeaux detour that changed everything
For the century following Mary Penfold's retirement, the winery grew steadily and significantly, producing fortified wines, clarets and Rieslings with increasing recognition. In 1948, Max Schubert became Penfolds' first official Chief Winemaker. He was 33 years old. He had joined the company seventeen years earlier as a messenger boy.
In 1950, Schubert was dispatched to Europe to study winemaking practices in Spain and Portugal. He made an unauthorised side trip to Bordeaux. What he encountered there was wines of extraordinary age and refinement, built to last not years but decades, crystallised an ambition he would spend the rest of his working life pursuing. He returned to Adelaide with a singular objective: to create an Australian red wine capable of the same longevity and stature as the finest Bordeaux.
His raw material was Shiraz, not Cabernet, as Bordeaux dictated, but the grape that South Australia had in abundance and that Schubert believed could produce wine of equivalent gravity. For his first experimental vintage in 1951, he sourced fruit from Magill Estate and Morphett Vale, fermented in new American oak hogsheads, and produced a wine that was unlike anything previously made in this country. He named it Grange Hermitage, Grange after the cottage where Penfolds began, Hermitage after the premier Shiraz appellation of France's northern Rhône Valley.
The board ordered him to stop. He didn't.
The reception was not kind. At a tasting in Sydney for Penfolds management and wine identities, the wine was rejected almost unanimously. Too full-bodied. Too tannic. Too raw. "A concoction of wild fruits and sundry berries," one critic reportedly observed in Schubert's presence. In 1957, Schubert received written instructions from the Penfolds board to cease production of Grange Hermitage entirely. He pocketed the letter without disclosing its contents to his winemaking team, and continued production in secret, hiding the 1957, 1958, and 1959 vintages in the depths of the Magill underground cellars.
He was not making wine for now. He was making wine for later, for the moment when those early vintages would have matured sufficiently to reveal what he already knew they contained.
That moment arrived before 1960. As the concealed vintages began to show their potential in bottle, the Penfolds board reversed its position entirely and reinstated Grange production. It was ten years from the first experimental vintage to general acceptance. Within a generation, it would be regarded as the standard-bearer for Australian fine wine.
The ascent, and the accolades
The record of achievement that followed is extraordinary in scope and consistency. The 1955 vintage accumulated more than 50 gold medals in competition. The 1971 vintage, submitted to a blind international tasting in 2015 alongside celebrated wines of the 1970s, took top score. That same vintage had earlier won first prize in Syrah/Shiraz at the Wine Olympics in Paris. The 1990 vintage was named Red Wine of the Year by Wine Spectator in 1995. The 2008 vintage became the first wine produced outside the Old World to receive simultaneous perfect 100-point scores from both Wine Spectator and Robert Parker's Wine Advocate.
In 2001, on the occasion of Grange's 50th anniversary, it was listed as a South Australian Heritage Icon by the National Trust, the only wine in Australia to hold that designation. It appears in Langton's Classification of Australian Wine at the Exceptional level, the highest tier, a position it has occupied since 1991.
The most expensive bottle of Australian wine ever sold at auction is a 1951 Grange, the first experimental vintage, produced in 1,800 bottles and largely given away at the time. It sold for $142,131 AUD in 2021.
What makes Grange unlike any other great wine
Most of the world's most celebrated wines are defined by place; a single vineyard, a specific appellation, a precisely mapped plot of land. Grange operates on a different principle entirely. It is blended from the finest Shiraz sites across South Australia; Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Magill Estate, Coonawarra in certain years, selected annually by the custodian winemaker based on the character of that vintage. What the collector acquires with Grange is not a terroir. It is a philosophy, and a lineage of custodians who have upheld it.
Schubert retired in 1975. Don Ditter assumed custodianship, then John Duval, then Peter Gago from 2002 onwards. Each one has inherited an unbroken tradition that began in a secret corner of the Magill cellars in 1957, and each has made it their own while keeping faith with the original vision: a wine built to outlast the generation that made it.
The production method has remained fundamentally unchanged. Partial barrel fermentation. Eighteen to twenty months of maturation in American oak hogsheads. Extended bottle ageing before release. A wine designed not to be opened immediately, but to be waited for, sometimes for decades.
Penfolds Grange at AlcVol
The Penfolds range, led by Grange, is available now at AlcVol. We carry both current releases and select library vintages, and we are available to assist with cellar building, gifting, or any question you have about the range.