Graphically at least, this bottle seems to suggest a radical break with Penfolds tradition. Gone is the slightly daggy, endearingly old school label that looks as if it were designed by a TAFE graduate armed with nothing more than a biro and a ruler. Instead, we have a perfectly ordinary, utterly corporate, yawn-inducingly generic label that strikes me as if it were designed solely to lend Penfolds product an air of internationally respectable cachet that would allow them to be sold alongside, oh, Mouton-Cadet on duty free shelves in Heathrow airport. It’s sad, really: packaging is important, and this just screams ‘Hey, we sold out to Southcorp, home of awesome heating equipment. Oh, and we make wine! International style wine guaranteed to never, ever raise eyebrows!’ Oh well.So: how’s the wine? In the glass, it’s deep, dark, rich and visibly aging at this point, a dark, rich red tinged with a hint of molasses. The nose seems just a little bit dumb, promising nothing more than aged wine, hinting at well-scrubbed linen closets and air-dried laundry. Things finally get going when you actually drink some: there’s still a good sense of sweetness and heft here, amplified by very subtle cedary oak, that expands into a somewhat simple, slightly sour, really rather delicious finish supported by some well-rounded tannins.Given the somewhat bright acidity here, this wine really doesn’t work well on its own. Add a steak, though, and I think you’re in the right place in terms of doing what the winemakers presumably were hoping you’d do. This is fairly decent cabernet, not really international style (the sourness! the moderate alcohol!) and also definitely not Bordeaux (no minerality! no greenness!), so I suppose it really is uniquely Penfolds. Not bad, and yet somehow lacking (at least to me). Would I buy it again? Yeah, probably. Would I wait so long to drink it? No – something appears to have gone missing along the way. I’m not getting particularly interesting aged characteristics here, and I’m thinking this might’ve been more interesting five years ago.Penfolds
Price: $18
Closure: Cork