Austrance: Penfolds is mixing its famous Grange with French shiraz to make a $3500 wine

Credit to the Chinese – they were the first to experiment with blending Australia’s most famous wine (and one of its most expensive), Penfolds Grange, decades ago, serving the red wine with cola.

(There’s even a bar in Adelaide where you can try it – and we love this 3-star review of the 1965, selling for $9000.)

But Penfolds has now found a way to make its $1000 shiraz even more expensive, by blending it with a $550 French wine from the Northern Rhone region and asking the curiously rich to $3,500 for it.

Grange La Chapelle blend is a 50/50 split of 2021 the yet-to-be-released 2021 South Australian shiraz with La Chapelle Hermitage from producer Paul Jaboulet Aine. In a nation that knows a thing of two about charging like a wounded bull for wines Penfolds has created something for trophy hunters making way too much money.

“A blend fated to happen!” Penfolds say. Maybe if the marketing department is in charge of fate.

And please read the following from the Penfolds pitch to the sound of swelling violins:

“Bold and unique. Uniting winemaking cultures, spanning hemispheres and time. Fate. A longstanding friendship between two winemakers created an idea. The idea became a trial. The trial became a wine. And then there were three – 2021 (bottled), 2022 (bottled) and 2023 (in barrel).

“Who would have thought? Syrah from the legendary Hill of Hermitage, La Chapelle, coupled with Shiraz from esteemed South Australian vineyards, Grange. The blend’s raison d’être: One variety – reunited, reinterpreted, reassembled.”

It sounds a little like that time Tassie girl Mary Donaldson met a Danish sailor in the Slip Inn during the Sydney Olympics.

Paul Jaboulet winemaker Caroline Frey is so fired up by the experience she could only invoke Spanish surrealists.

Winemakers Caroline Frey & Peter Gago, who created the Grange La Chapelle 2021. Image: Penfolds

“No-one in the world has ever blended two such legendary terroirs. It’s like Picasso and Dalí painting on the same canvas – an idea so extraordinary it almost feels too incredible to be real,” she said.

Well, the art world has had a problem with Dali fakes for decades, with the forgery market estimated to be worth around US$3 billion.

And as Huon Hooke from the excellent wine site The Real Review pointed out, there’s no “terroir” – French for land, and in wine, the notion that you can taste the environment – in Grange, because its a blend of vineyards and regions in South Australia — the Barossa and Clare valleys, and McLaren Vale, for the 2021.

“To put Grange and La Chapelle together would appear to obliterate any idea of terroir from either side. (And I imagine the Grange component would dominate the blend),” Hooke wrote in discussing the Grange La Chapelle blend.

The veteran wine critic hasn’t tried it yet, but says he’s keen.

Penfolds winemaker Peter Gago sounds like one of those art critics in a beret staring at an abstract expressionist work when talking about the Grange La Chapelle blend: “Truly, a blend waiting to happen. Emotionally, a wine beguilingly alluring. Ultimately, harmony and classicism redefined.”

When both wines are released next year, maybe I should just mix them up together for half the price, and redefine the cost of premium wines. Then add coke.