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, former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of the highly respected The Winefront site.

Mattinson has been an independent wine critic and photo-journalist since 1987. 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; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the prized Best Australian Sports Writing Award.

Mattinson, who is 100% independent, puts a score out of 100 on every wine that he reviews. But what he’d rather do, is tell you the wine’s story.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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