Tahbilk Marsanne 2024
Tahbilk’s standard marsanne is a ‘legend’ of Australian retail wine. It offers genuine quality at a modest price. The latest 2024 Tahbilk Marsanne can be had for just $16-ish. This is fundamentally remarkable value.
Last week I raved about the latest Tahbilk Marsanne 2024 on The Winefront site. This is a wine with an incredibly long lineage – The Winefront has 56 different Tahbilk Marsanne releases reviewed, dating back to 1953 – and throughout my time as a writer on wine, which now approaches 25 years, it’s always been a wine that has attracted positive reviews. Indeed for many, many years it was pretty much standard that Tahbilk Marsanne (and Mount Pleasant Elizabeth Semillon) would appear in James Halliday’s annual Top 100, among other accolades. It’s a wine that has, quite rightly, inspired immense respect. For me personally some of my earliest wine-drinking memories involved Chateau Tahbilk Marsanne; it has long been a go-to accompaniment to my decades long addiction to carbonara. I also remember many a hot summer’s night at the end of the 1980s when I’d quaff this at my local Indian. Tahbilk Marsanne and me, we have history.
More importantly, the 2024 edition of Tahbilk's famous Marsanne is one of this wine’s better releases. It's a $22 'classic', good for now and worthy of the cellar. Shop around and you’ll find this wine at $16-ish. This wine used to cost me ten bucks thirty years ago. The fact that the quality is still good, and that it’s still only $16, is astonishing.
It begs the question though: does anyone care about this wine?
I love a quotable statement, so let me attempt to make one here. There are two types of Tahbilk wine: chronically under priced, and outrageously over priced. The problem is that not too many people care – either way.
Yes, there are true Tahbilk believers out there. Go to the Dan Murphy’s website and you’ll find dozens of people commenting positively on Tahbilk’s wines. Most of these comments will mention, as I have above, that they’ve been drinking Tahbilk’s wines for decades. The vibe is that some oldies love these wines. The vibe is that outside of this rust, there isn’t much fresh steel.
More worryingly, I can’t remember the last time I heard someone mention Tahbilk when talk turned to the best of Australian wine. No Tahbilk wine is anywhere to be seen on either the industry-leading Wineark’s Most Collected Wines list, or even in Langton’s 8th Classification. This is clearly a problem for Tahbilk. The top end of Tahbilk’s wine hierarchy seemed to go from $100 per bottle to $200 and then to over $350 in a hurry, and without really taking anyone with them. Indeed along the way, in top-end wine terms, Tahbilk has lost the battle for relevancy. Almost no one raves about Tahbilk’s old vine red wines anymore, outside of a few seasoned wine reviewers.
In pricing terms, at the top end, Tahbilk’s strategy seems to have been: we can’t sell it at $100, so we might as well charge $350.
It might seem as if none of this matters to this Tahbilk Marsanne 2024. But the truth is that it probably helps to keep the price down. The top end of Tahbilk’s wine offerings certainly aren’t dragging the price of this perennial bargain up. Personally, this suits me fine. At this price, Tahbilk Marsanne is a wine that we all should buy. It’s the real deal, unique and interesting and cellarworthy and delicious. At $16-ish, it is value, underlined and in capitals.
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Tahbilk Marsanne 2024: Review and score on The Wine Front.
