Penfolds

Penfolds is a Mattinson Ten Star Winery.

Penfolds is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.
Only the best of Australia’s best wineries are ranked as a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.

If you deleted the story and the history of Penfolds, and just judged the Penfolds wines as they rest in the glass today, it would still be a runaway champion of Australian wine. Penfolds is for instance a great chardonnay maker, and would make it onto this list on the strength of its chardonnay releases alone. In fact, you could even delete Penfolds Grange from the range – but not from the history – and Penfolds would still be a stellar Ten Star producer. You would of course never do such a thing; Penfolds Grange is Australia’s most significant wine, and will forever be. There are many wines in the Penfolds range but there is no such thing as a bad Penfolds wine. Every Penfolds wine is good, better or great. It can even be said that every year, essentially without fail, Penfolds releases a wine or multiple wines of classic quality. These are extraordinary statements and yet they are true. The wings of Penfolds have expanded over the years, to new territories and tables, not to mention price points. But the armoury of wines released under the Penfolds name each year is, in quality terms, more bulletproof than ever.

And then there are exquisite wines like the Penfolds Bin 180 Cabernet Shiraz 2021.

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There have been 71 reviews of Penfolds Grange published on The Winefront site, 1952–2020.

There have been 56 reviews of Penfolds St Henri published on The Winefront site, 1956–2021.

There have been 46 reviews of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz published on The Winefront site, 1961–2022.

Campbell Mattinson

This article was written by Campbell Mattinson, founder of The Winefront and mattinson, and former chief editor of Halliday.

When you pick up a wine book and see thousands of top-scoring wines, it’s hard to know which wine to choose. Mattinson guides you through this maze, giving you an honest view of the best Australian wines, the best wine stories, the best wine producers, the best value wines and simply, the best tasting wines. Importantly, Mattinson will tell you about the top-rated wines and also about the underrated wines. In short, Mattinson knows Australian wines inside and out.

Mattinson has been a photo-journalist since 1987. For the past 25 years he’s been a voice that you can trust when you’re looking for the best wines. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award, and is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter. He’s not afraid to put a score beside a wine. But what he’d rather do, is tell you the wine’s story.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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