Last month in Paris, Penfolds released its most contentious wine since the very creation of Grange itself: Penfolds Grange La Chapelle Shiraz Syrah 2021. On paper it could not be more bewildering. Grange is an official Heritage Icon of South Australia. It’s definitively and idiosyncratically Australian – the Uluru of shiraz. La Chapelle is the […]

Australian wine is in a very exciting place in 2024, for reasons completely missed by the headline news. This is a year in which reporting has been dominated by dramatic oversupply, diminishing consumption, waning exports, drought, frost and economic calamity. Many wineries find themselves at a particularly challenging moment in the cycle. But there’s a […]

Together with Australia’s premier wine auction house Langtons, it’s my great pleasure to invite you to join me as a participant in the largest fine and rare champagne auction ever held in Australia, as announced in The Australian Financial Review last month. Champagne: Auctioning the World’s Finest will be an annual champagne platform hosted online for the […]

This year’s best buys from Penfolds are Bin 600 Cabernet Shiraz 2021 ($90), Bin 704 Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 ($125), Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon 2022 ($130), St Henri Shiraz 2021 ($135), Bin 169 Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2022 ($300) and – if you happen to win the lotto – Bin 180 Coonawarra Cabernet Shiraz 2021 (at a […]

It’s my immense pleasure to announce my biggest and most anticipated book launch yet – The Champagne Guide Edition VII! The Champagne Guide Edition VII is in a new magnum-sized format! It’s more than 50 percent bigger than the previous edition and more than three times the size of the first five editions, featuring a record […]

I met Charles Heidsieck’s new Chef de Cave Elise Losfelt on an intense morning at a particularly pivotal moment of her career and asked her how a newcomer can carry on the legacy of one of the greatest lineages of chef de caves in champagne history. Charles Heidsieck was one of the very first houses […]

The 2023 Penfolds Collection release comes with a particularly high level of anticipation this year, thanks to the exemplary 2021 and 2022 harvests across south-eastern Australia, hailed by Peter Gago as the two best back-to-back vintages for reds in Coonawarra since 1990 and 1991.

The sister champagne houses of Piper-Heidsieck, Charles Heidsieck and Rare Champagne have become the first in Champagne to join 21 other wineries globally in achieving B Corp certification to strengthen their commitments to both social and environmental issues. When I first met Émilien Boutillat after he joined Piper-Heidsieck as Chef de Cave in October 2018, […]

Another highly anticipated Penfolds Collection lands on 4 August! The inaugural Bordeaux release showcases that a vision of classic Penfolds winemaking makes for a compelling offering in the landscape of Bordeaux (scroll down). And the Napa set is evidence that Penfolds’ fit here is a confident one, too. For what it’s worth, the two wines […]

The creation of the legendary Champagne Charlie is surrounded in incredible secrets that have remained buried since 1976 – secrets unknown even to colleagues who worked alongside its creator Daniel Thibault himself. With the rebirth of Champagne Charlie, all is now revealed.