Nick Ryan on the lessons he learned after joining the tasting team for the ninth edition of Penfolds’ The Rewards of Patience.
The invitation to taste wines made beneath your feet in inverse hemispheres can be reasonably questioned but unwisely declined. Over the past 18 months, I’ve tasted through seven decades of Cabernet Sauvignon from the dark red soils of Coonawarra overlooking the Place de la Concorde, once stained a similar color by the spurting jugulars of the French aristocracy. I’ve learned the best preparation for tackling a collection of Australia’s most famous wine is a brisk walk through Regent’s Park and St James’s. It’s all part of a Penfolds plan to record for posterity the Rewards of Patience. Even if it sometimes feels like collecting the wages of sin.
Rewards of Patience is, as far as I’m aware, unique in the world of wine. Every few years, a United Nations of wine writers is assembled to work their way through virtually every significant wine that Penfolds has made since the early 1950s. Their ruminations, their insightful assessments, their clinical dissections and poetic profundity are all corralled by Andrew Caillard MW and entwined with his own deep understanding of Penfolds history and winemaking to produce a book called The Rewards of Patience.
It serves as a health check on the wines for the many who collect them around the world. The tasting methodology, especially where it concerns the older wines, follows similar lines to the doctor doing rounds at the old folks’ home. Celebrate signs of life when you find them, declare a time of death when you don’t. Chief winemaker Peter Gago’s willingness to open several bottles of even the rarest wines to understand the best-case scenario that could exist in a collector’s cellar somewhere is to be admired by everyone apart from the company accountant.
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In 2019, I was a member of the tasting panel that conducted its work entirely at Penfolds’ headquarters in the foothills of Adelaide and produced the eighth edition of The Rewards of Patience. Five years later, and the tastings schedule for the ninth edition went global.
Penfolds’ top-tier Cabernet Sauvignon, Bin 707, and the stylistic Shiraz counterpoint to Grange, the much loved St Henri, were the centerpieces of two days tasting in Paris in February 2024. Grange back to 1952 and a paradigm-shifting vertical of Yattarna Chardonnay were highlights of several days in London in October of the same year. A group of Asia-based writers was convened in Hong Kong, and another panel of Australia-based tasters met in Adelaide to finalize the program. Or so we thought.
The best the enemy of the good
I was involved in the Paris and London tastings, and the novelty of tasting such familiar wines in out-of-kilter context was strangely satisfying. But even more compelling was trying to wrap my head around the sheer logistics of it all. Several hundred wines were tasted, and in almost every instance, multiple bottles of each wine were in place if required. It’s no small undertaking and was years in the planning.
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It’s hardly surprising, then, that while each tasting of a particular cuvée was expansive, they weren’t all exhaustive. It was just simply not feasible to ship everything around the world, so a handful of gaps were to be expected. And that was where I thought we’d leave it, until a last-minute compulsion for completion saw Peter Gago summon Caillard and me back to Penfolds in Adelaide to taste those wines that had stayed behind: a small handful of Bin 707 vintages, a clutch of Bin 389s, and 15 vintages of Grange that had, unfairly in many cases, always been considered “minor” Granges. This proved, for me at least, to be the most insightful tasting of them all.
Working your way up the chain in an Australian wine career has always been signposted by Grange, its peaks and troughs forming the topography that shapes your view of the wine world under southern skies. I knew the reputation of wines like the 1953 and 1955 long before I ever got to taste them. Every mentor I had in the early days would remind me of my good fortune to be born in the “great Grange year” of 1971. I remember the impact the 1990 made when it was released in my first year working for a fine-wine merchant in Sydney.
So, the handful of large Grange tastings I’ve done have all—not intentionally, but instinctively—been an exercise in venerating the icons and skimming over the wines left in their wake. But when those wines have a chance to speak for themselves, when they are viewed in limelight, not shade, they can be very revealing. Wines such as the demure 1960, with its dried fruits, reds more than blacks and blues, its faded florals, sweet viscera, panforte, and worn leather. Tannins that feel like they’re called to arms from deep within the wine, quietly assembling, aligning, and coalescing to form a fine, sturdy framework that will support the wine for a long time to come. It never stood out for me before.
Or the 1972, perpetually ignored by the legendary ’71 and my particular connection to it, shone on this day like it never had before, looking remarkably sprightly and poised. All through the tasting, this Salon des Refusés of sorts, a thought began to form—a new understanding that we can sometimes learn just as much from the minor works as the masterpieces. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark may not be Lolita but is well worth reading. Kubrick’s The Killing is a brilliant film, even if it’s not quite 2001 (or Lolita, for that matter). Prince’s Around the World in a Day is still worth a listen, even if it’s no Purple Rain. Sometimes the quiet ones have plenty to say.
