My personal Top 5 of The Penfolds Collection 2025 (including one major surprise)
These are my personal selections of The Penfolds Collection 2025.
I’ve been tasting the top-end Penfolds wines every year for nearly 25 years, drinking them for 35 years, and have tasted verticals back to the 1950s.
The big surprise is that a Penfolds Pinot Noir has made it onto this list.
These are not “the best” wines; they are the wines I would personally choose/buy.
St Henri Shiraz is the only Penfolds wine from last year’s list to again make it onto this 2025 list.
The Penfolds Collection 2025 is released on August 7, 2025.
Given that this is a personal selection from The Penfolds Collection 2025, and that I’ve tasted the collection in its entirety every year for nearly 25 years, and that I’ve been lucky to taste close* to every Penfolds red wine in its history, you might think that my personal selection from the 22 wines that make up this year’s collection might not change from year to year. I’ve been drinking some of these wines for 35 years and for a long time the iconic Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz was a bedrock of my personal cellar. I have my long-term favourites, you could say. And yet when I sat down to select (only) five for this year, only one of these five has carried over from my Top 5 of 2024. Penfolds is renowned for its “house style” but even so, vintage variation is real, and the stand-outs from year-to-year are different.
Nothing proves this point more starkly than the first wine in this list.
Penfolds Bin 23 Pinot Noir 2024 (AU$55)
If you’d asked me, prior to tasting any of this year’s wines, to ‘guess’ what my top five selections might be, Penfolds Bin 23 Pinot Noir 2024 would have been the last wine I would have guessed. Last by a mile. Pinot Noir from Penfolds has had its minor moments over the years but in general it’s been more of a slightly-lighter, slightly-stewier dry red style of pinot noir, sans charm. This 2024 release, made entirely from Tasmanian grapes, weighing in at 13.5% alcohol, is expressive, varietal, structured and delicious. I’m not sure what they did differently, or whether its quality is a one-off, but this is the best Pinot Noir ever released under the Penfolds name.
Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay 2023 (AU$220)
They don’t call it The White Grange for nothing. And in all honesty, if you’re really into the top end of the Penfolds wines or if you really want to splash out on the best of the Penfolds best, then Yattarna Chardonnay is where the smart money’s going. In my review on The Winefront I started with the words “Terrific power, concentration and length” and ended with “This is a beautiful, beautiful chardonnay. Wonderful texture, flavour, length and everything.” They’ve been making Yattarna since 1995, it now has a long, proud and glorious history, and right there in the glass, it’s the duck’s guts. It ages well too.
Penfolds Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon 2023 (AU$130)
I cut my wine teeth at a time when Penfolds Bin 407 was the same price as Penfolds Bin 28, which was how they were for an era. Now that they are AU$130 versus AU$50, it hurts to still love drinking Bin 407 so much. Truth is though that Bin 407 is a much better wine, more consistently, than it once was, and this 2023 release proves this again. My description on The Winefront starts with “That beautiful combination of mint and blackcurrant, olives and cedar, woodsmoke and violets, with bay leaf and redder berried fruit notes pushing through as it breathes”, and concludes with “Penfolds at its best.”
Plus, there are just so many hits in the line of Penfolds Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon releases now.
Penfolds FWT 585 Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot Petit Verdot 2022 (AU$100)
Given the history and classification of Bordeaux, it can be hard to know what to make of a Penfolds wine, made with Borderaux-grown grapes, matured in American oak (and French). It does your head in a bit. But over the course of tasting and re-tasting this wine, I slowly admitted to myself that I liked it very much. It's a wine of creamy, curranty flamboyance but also of rusty, ferrous character. It’s French, it’s Penfolds, it’s American oak and it works.
Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2022 (AU$135)
Last year I said that St Henri Shiraz is the Betamax of the Penfolds range; it’s the alternative wine-style route that never became the main Penfolds way, but arguably should have. St Henri is not matured in new oak, is matured in large old vats, is an open expression of great Australian shiraz fruit flavour, and has an epic ability to charm the socks off you once it’s had the chance to age. Of all the wines in the Penfolds range, St Henri Shiraz is also the only one to make it into my personal list now two years in a row. The long chains of spicy tannin evident in this 2022 release; the near-exaggerated swirls of roasted spices, nuts, orange peel and leather; and the emphatic finish, all make for a fantastic edition of Penfolds St Henri Shiraz.
(If you really want a comprehensive guide to Penfolds St Henri Shiraz, subscribe to The Winefront and sink your teeth into this treasure-trove.)
These are my five personal picks of The Penfolds Collection 2025. I wasn’t tempted to put Penfolds Grange Shiraz 2021 into this list, even though it’s an excellent addition to the Grange lineage.
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Penfolds Bin 95 Grange Shiraz 2021 review.
Penfolds Mattinson 10-Star Winery entry.
All The Penfolds Collection 2025 wines reviewed and rated by Mattinson on The Winefront.
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I said above that I’ve tasted close* to every Penfolds red wine ever made. Penfolds make a lot of wines at the ‘consumer’ end of the market, every year, that never feature in these tastings, and I have unfortunately missed out on tasting many of these wines over the years. There’s the odd wine each year that is, for one reason or another, missed: the 2021 Quantum didn’t make it to my bench this year, for instance. But I have tasted the premium collection annually for close to 25 years, and I have tasted full verticals of all the major Penfolds wines, going back to the 1950s.
