Penfolds Grange Shiraz 1983
Penfolds Grange Shiraz 1983
13.3% alcohol, cork, South Australia.
Penfolds Grange Shiraz is listed as a Heritage Icon of South Australia. It boasts an unbroken lineage back to 1951. It’s released as a four-year-old.
1983 was a hot, tragic vintage (marked by the Ash Wednesday bushfires) though it was also marked by heavy rain (and floods) around harvest time.
Many aspects of 1983 were a winegrower's worst nightmare. And yet out of the mayhem and indeed the human tragedy a monumental 1983 Penfolds Grange was produced.
1983 Grange has always been known as a heavy-hitting release.
1983 Grange is regularly included in lists of “Great Grange Releases”.
This specific Penfolds Grange 1983 is made using a blend of 94 percent shiraz and 6 percent cabernet sauvignon.
1983 Penfolds Grange was made by winemaker Don Ditter. Ditter was the Penfolds chief winemaker between 1976 and 1986.
Grapes for the 1983 Grange were grown in the Barossa Valley (Kalimna Vineyard and others), Magill Estate (Adelaide), and the Modbury Vineyard (Adelaide).
Mattinson has tasted Penfolds Grange 1983 on two occasions, at various points of its development.
1983 Grange has always been one of the biggest and burliest of Penfolds Grange relesses. It’s often regarded as a great release, though perhaps a little less so now than it once was. I didn’t taste it on release but I’ve seen it on two occasions since, once at a Penfolds Rewards of Patience tasting and again in 2018. It offers deep, brooding, timeless scents with a whopping slink of malt, licorice and blackberry. In late 2003 – when this wine was 20 years old – this release still tasted very youthful, though it was just starting to come around. It then offered rich licorice flavours, drying tannin, a cigar-box savouriness and oodles of concentrated, muscular power, both tannin and fruit. It also had mint-doused leather characters, sexily interwoven. I called it at this 2003 tasting “a rugged champion of a wine”. When I tasted it again in 2018 it was more seriously advanced. It still though seemed muscular, sizeable, tannic, and imposing. Charm has never really entered this wine’s building but for sheer flex 1983 Grange can still impress, often mightily.
94 points.
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All reviews of Penfolds Grange on this site are available via the Penfolds Grange tag.
Penfolds is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery.
The best guide to Penfolds Grange Shiraz is The Winefront.The Winefront has honest, independent reviews of every release of Penfolds Grange from the 1952 Penfolds Grange through to the current release. The Winefront (and this Mattinson site) has no association or working relationship with Penfolds in any way; never has and never will.
Campbell Mattinson has tasted every vintage of Penfolds Grange from the 1952 Penfolds Grange through to the current release of Penfolds Grange inclusive.
Campbell Mattinson has been a journalist for 40 years, a wine critic for 25 years, is a former chief editor of Halliday Wine Companion and was the founder of The Winefront business. He’s steadfastly independent. He’s published five books on wine, four of them bestsellers.
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