S.C. Pannell
S.C. Pannell is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery — Campbell Mattinson's highest honour.
McLaren Vale.
Thirty years ago Steve Pannell made history – and he’s still making it.
The case.
If you win the Jimmy Watson Trophy, in Australia, your name goes down in history, or the wine that you made does. If you win it twice, you’re a legend in Australian winemaking circles. If you win it three times, your name goes around the world. Penfolds won it three times in the 1960s. Wolf Blass won it three times (in a row) in the 1970s. Cape Mentelle won it twice in the early 1980s, back to back, and it put them on the map. This is all never-to-be-repeated history, you’d think: no wine producer any time in the past 40 years has dominated the Jimmy Watson Trophy results like those companies did back in the early days of the award. If you win the Jimmy Watson now, it may or may not be a life-changing event. What this award is though, now, is once-in-a-lifetime.
Or it is, unless your name is Steve Pannell, aka S.C. Pannell. Pannell has won it twice. You have to either be eagle-eyed or in-the-know to realise this, because he (or a wine he made) won it when he was chief winemaker at Hardy’s (in 1996, for Eileen Hardy Shiraz 1995) and then miraculously won it a second time, this time under his own name, in 2014 (for his 2013 S.C. Pannell Syrah). In the past forty years then Steve Pannell is the only Australian winemaker to have stepped up to the stage to accept this award twice.
There’s an irony to this, or an almost-irony at the very least. It’s this: both of Pannell’s victorious wines were made with shiraz, and yet shiraz is not Pannell’s favourite variety and, indeed, is not the variety he liked to be best remembered for.
He still makes great shiraz, mind (see below), and great Cabernet Touriga too (also below), helped by his ownership of the great McLaren Vale vineyard known as Koomilya. But Nebbiolo and most especially grenache, the former grown in the Adelaide Hills and the latter in McLaren Vale, is where the real fire burns. In fact if there’s a “father” of modern Australian grenache, on the winemaking side of things, it’s not absurd to suggest that Steve Pannell is that person, along with perhaps (the late) Peter Fraser at Yangarra. Pannell made the grenache wines that helped make people see. He spoke to them. He championed them. He poured them. He didn’t just think or wonder: he did. And he still does.
The wines that carry the case.
Koomilya DC Block Shiraz 2021 (McLaren Vale): Staggeringly good wine. It’s so powerful, so pretty, has such presence and then has such persistence.
Koomilya JC Block Shiraz 2022 (McLaren Vale): It’s super-firm, super-concentrated, super-imposing and super-svelte, though at all points it feels authentic and true.
Koomilya Cabernet Touriga 2021 (McLaren Vale): Winefront.
S.C. Pannell Little Branch Grenache 2023 (McLaren Vale): Quite exquisite. Flashy in the purest of ways. A profound statement, spoken in whispers.
S.C. Pannell Sunrise 99 Grenache 2022 (McLaren Vale): Red berries, dry spices, stonefruits hanging, flowers flung. It’s a dry juicy ricochet of a wine. Fluff no more. This is grenache for the ages.
S.C. Pannell is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery – the highest honour awarded by Australian wine critic Campbell Mattinson. 10-Star status recognises one thing: the quality of the wine in the glass, every glass, across the range. The full list of 10-Star Wineries constitutes Australia's Best Wineries.
