Last month in Paris, Penfolds released its most contentious wine since the very creation of Grange itself: Penfolds Grange La Chapelle Shiraz Syrah 2021.

On paper it could not be more bewildering. Grange is an official Heritage Icon of South Australia. It’s definitively and idiosyncratically Australian – the Uluru of shiraz. La Chapelle is the very pinnacle of France’s northern Rhône, a plot of old syrah vines clutching ancient granite surrounding the famous chapel of St Christopher atop the legendary hill of Hermitage itself; an icon of the world of wine for generations. To the French, it’s the Notre Dame of syrah – it’s sacred in every sense. To force these two incongruent worlds together would be like building the Eiffel tower atop the Sydney Opera House. It begs the question that Jancis Robinson uttered on her first encounter with Penfolds G3: ‘What’s the point?’

As an Australian wine writer who spends more time in the vineyards of France than Australia, I was intrigued to taste this unique and courageous creation, so I asked Penfolds Chief Winemaker Peter Gago for a preview. He flew in yesterday afternoon for a top-secret rendezvous between flights in a private room behind the secret doors of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge at Brisbane Airport.

My intention was to publish nothing more than a tasting note and a score. But after two hours vigorously interrogating just one bottle, it became apparent that Grange La Chapelle represents very much more than just an unlikely, unexpected and divisive blend of two disparate icons.

There’s nothing unusual about multinational blending. This is already old hat for Penfolds. But to do so not only with two of the most iconic wines of Australia and France, to unite two wines so fundamentally distinct in every way, and to do so with surprising – indeed, downright astonishing – success is monumental and unprecedented.

This wine has singly challenged my fundamental conception of wine identity, shaking the very core of my perception of sense of place, of terroir. It smashes the glass ceiling and opens up a new world of previously unimaginable blending possibilities. Penfolds Grange La Chapelle is the Sistine Chapel of modern wine. It changes the game of what wine is and of what it can be.

While Grange La Chapelle represents the first time Grange has been blended with wine from another maker, multinational blending is something that Gago has been playing with since 2018. It all started when he and his Californian winemaking team couldn’t get a blend of Napa cabernet to come together. He cheekily added 14.9% South Australia cabernet and watched their jaws drop! ‘Until we blend it, we can’t believe that it can work!’ he exclaimed. ‘A little bit of black magic occurs! I didn’t even know if we were allowed to do it at the time, so I sent our legal team into a spin to find out!’ And so Bin 149 Wine of the World Cabernet Sauvignon 2018 was born.

Australia’s most iconic brand’s forays into global winemaking go deep, first in New Zealand in 1963, then with an obscure attempt at blending fortified shiraz with the Chinese spirit baijiu in 2017, a collaboration with Champagne Thiénot in 2019, and releases from California unveiled in 2021, Bordeaux in 2022 and China in 2023. All met with more than their share of raised eyebrows. To be fair, Champagne was a far stretch from the Penfolds DNA, and the wines were not made by Penfolds. But Bordeaux and China show plenty of promise, and California was a much more natural fit for the brand, a significant historical proposition, and the wines show it.

The company purchased a 50 percent share in California’s Geyser Peak Winery in Sonoma County in 1989, planted some 160 hectares of Californian vines from Kalimna and Magill Estate cuttings in 1998 and 1999, bottled shiraz in 2006 and 2007 (still in the cellars, never released), ultimately merging with Beringer Blass in 2005 and Diageo in 2015, bringing a significant cache of Californian wineries into the fold. In 2019, Penfolds’ owner, Treasury Wine Estates, purchased a property in Bordeaux, Château Cambon La Pelouse, in the Haut-Médoc.

‘This is our world now,’ Gago declared. ‘We are now playing trans-hemispheres!’

It is this backdrop of deep history and gathered experience that sets the stage for Grange La Chapelle. Without this, its creation would have never been possible in practice, nor even in philosophy.

‘I’ve been good friends with the Jaboulet family (former owners of La Chapelle) for a long time and I would have loved to do this collaboration years ago, but you would not have even suggested it then!’ Gago admitted. ‘It was only after our experience in Champagne and Bordeaux that it was a question I could ask.’

La Chapelle Winemaker Caroline Frey said that she would never have even dared to imagine blending two such legendary terroirs.

‘I have known Caroline for a long time, and this project came out of our friendship,’ Gago explained. ‘I approached her and she placated me by agreeing to do some trials. I’ve been collecting La Chapelle for decades and originally we just thought to blend shiraz and syrah. We exchanged some samples without revealing their origins or oak treatments and did all the trial blends by Zoom during the pandemic. It became very apparent that while all the trials were beautiful and evocative, one was poles apart from everything else. And, lo and behold, it was La Chapelle and Grange! I had thought originally St Henri might be the best match with La Chapelle but, no, it had to be Grange! It was not an ambush or a preordained outcome, but it could not have turned out better!’

The blend is equal halves of the final blends of Grange and La Chapelle. ‘It’s a no-guts-no-glory approach to blending!’ exclaimed Gago. ‘Irrespective of whether Grange or La Chapelle has a good or bad vintage, we will still uphold a 50/50 blend.’ It’s intended as an annual release, and they might pull the plug on a year if it doesn’t meet their standards, but it hasn’t happened yet. He is even more excited about 2022 than 2021. Currently, 2023 is in barrel and 2024 will be blended in the coming months.

French law does not permit bottling in France, so the La Chapelle component is air freighted to South Australia in temperature-controlled, stainless-steel pallet tankers. Gago is contemplating air freighting barrels. ‘This is the most foolproof way of getting wine from there to here,’ he explained. ‘There is new technology that allows us to age Bin 407 with the bung at the two o’clock position (to retain more fruit and reduce topping), so we know the seal is reliable.’

The La Chapelle component is shipped as soon as it has completed malolactic fermentation. ‘The earlier we get it here, the greater the time we can age it as a blend,’ Gago pointed out. He blends it with his team as soon as it lands and puts it back into barrels. The Grange component (Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale and Clare Valley) was matured in 100 percent new American oak and La Chapelle in 15 percent new French oak. In an attempt to uphold the same ratios, the finished blend is matured 50 percent in Grange barrels and 50 percent in French oak barrels ex-RWT (not new barrels at this point, but barrels already in use). ‘We do our best to calculate and maintain the style and integrity. And then we taste and taste and send samples to La Chapelle to decide on when to bottle.’

Penfolds has not declared the production of Grange La Chapelle, though Gago revealed that it’s ‘just thousands of bottles’ compared with approximately 7-10,000 dozen of Grange (which he points out is half the volume of many Bordeaux First Growths). The allocation is only one bottle per customer and Australia’s share sold out in three days, prompting the company to attempt to swing more allocation back from other markets.

At a cool $3500, it’s priced equivalent to Penfolds’ G-Series. The first release, G3, has recently been fetching $10,000 at Langtons Auctions, though G5 is still selling at around its release price. Scarcity drives demand and inflates price. By contrast, the best vintages of Grange like 2010 currently fetch just $650-$750 in the secondary market, far from the current vintage shelf price of $1000.

‘There’s a tall poppy syndrome in Australia, but Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Le Pin and Petrus can do it, so why not Penfolds?!’ Gago pondered.

Whenever I visit Paris, I love popping into all the fashion boutiques on Avenue Montaigne to stare starry-eyed at their glamorous new collections. Like most of us, I’ll never afford their most exclusive offerings (but their exquisite designs do provide wonderful stimulus for the cover and packaging of my Champagne Guides!). There is tremendous inspiration in the finest and most daring of creations in every pursuit, and there is a rightful place and a strong demand for the most exclusive pieces of high fashion, as there is of fine wine.

I feel great pride that Australia can not only play against France in this high-stakes game, but now, for the first time, with France. Even in the same bottle. Sacre bleu!

Penfolds Grange La Chapelle Shiraz Syrah 2021

$3500

14% alcohol

Unexpected in every way, this is a wine as unique and singular as its inimitable and unprecedented recipe. The result of blending such vastly disparate components is astonishing in its harmonious synergy. It unites magnificent depth of blackberry, blueberry and satsuma plum fruits, dark spice and black pepper, seamlessly marrying the fruit magnificence of Grange with the fine-boned, mineral structure of La Chapelle. The summer of 2021 was afflicted with frequent heavy rains in the northern Rhône, swelling the berries and necessitating removal of some of the clear juice from the saignées to increase the skin-to-juice ratio. The season was one of the finest in South Australia in decades, cool by modern standards, but in fact in line with long-term averages – a classic in the truest sense. These restrained seasons collide to set a brightness and energy of crunchy acidity that propels its super-fine, velvety tannins with spectacular definition. The elegance and structural finesse of La Chapelle is the perfect partner to the opulence of Grange, not counteracting, contradicting, nor even offsetting, but rather synergising to accent, embrace and propel each other’s strengths. This is astounding on the highest order. The full ripeness, new American oak and sheer, voluminous presence of Grange in no way dominates the more delicate and savoury La Chapelle! Dark chocolate oak never overwhelms, but rather confidently pushes fruit and structure upwards and outwards. It holds every splendid detail in suspended animation for minutes. I love its plush Grange fruit core, its intriguing La Chapelle pepper/spice, its impossibly seamless harmony and most of all its velvet-fine and elegant tannin profile of fine granite, tapped by deep roots of old vines at the apex of Hermitage. Penfolds Grange La Chapelle Shiraz Syrah stands as a towering monument to the courageous tenacity of Gago and Frey. Bravo!

99 points

Drink 2041-2061