When I wandered around the local Dan Murphy’s a couple of weeks ago, I saw Wynns Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon 2017 on the shelf with a $45 price tag. No kidding. The same wine is $32 at 1st Choice, and it’s not on special. It’s 33 at Vintage Cellars (3 for $100). So much for the mega merchant who beats every price.
Now you know that I’m a big fan of the black label Cab Sav. I have a half dozen of each vintage from 2015 to 2006 in my cellar, except for the 2011 and 2007. 2017 was a wet vintage, with very little black label produced, yet here was DM asking $45 for the 2017. Checking other options, I found the much better and more mature 2012 at Kemenys for $29. I shared that good news with you, and trust you took advantage.
Timing is everything
I thought about buying more 2012 but I’m not short of black label Cabernet. I mulled it over for a week or more, then decided to grab a few more bottles. Sadly, it was all gone but now there was a 2013 on offer on Kemeny’s website for the same price. I checked my notes, vaguely remembering that the last bottle of this I opened was a winner.
My last review and others are very good, so I didn’t mull this around for too long. I put the order together online, adding a few other wines to the 3 black labels, then checked the basket and found that the 2013 had vanished into thin air. I checked Kemeny’s list of Wynns wines and drew a blank. All gone.
Wynns to the Rescue
As I swallowed my disappointment, an email arrived from Wynns with a special offer: a 6-pack of 2013 black label Cab Sav for $198. $33 dollars a bottle. I didn’t really want that many bottles so I did some more mulling around. While I was busy mulling, another email from Wynns arrived, reminding me that I hadn’t used the $25 gift voucher they’d sent me for my birthday 3 weeks back.
I wondered if that voucher would work on the 2013 black label special offer. Most of the time you don’t get 2 bites of the same cherry, but Wynns is more generous. The bottom line was now $173 for the 6-pack, which is just under $29 a bottle, and then I discovered that the freight was free. So I stopped mulling and bought the 6-pack.
Checking the member offers online at DM’s this morning for the BBW, I saw that one of the offers is a 6-pack of the Wynns black label Cab Sav – presumably the 2017 – for $204 or $34. Dearer than their main opposition, much dearer than the museum release from the winery – some member offer, that.
Yesterday the 2017 was still $45 on the shelf. So much for the mega wine merchant that beats every price
Greed is Good
On a shelf around the corner from the Wynns black label, closer to the back wall, I saw some Penfolds labels I hadn’t seen before:
- Penfolds The Noble Explorer Shiraz 2017
- Penfolds The Creative Genius Cabernet Sauvignon 2017
- Penfolds The Commander In Chief Shiraz Cabernet 2017
These wines were released a year ago for Penfolds’ 175th anniversary, but I can’t recall any fanfare about this release from that time. ‘The ‘Tribute Range’ is a set of limited edition drops dedicated to four of the most interesting, influential characters in Penfolds’ almost two-century history,’ GQ gushes. ‘Naturally, they’re all set to be vying for a place in the wine collections of just about any enthusiast.’
The wines are dedicated to the memories of Max Schubert, Ray Beckwith, founder Christopher Rawson Penfold and his wife Mary. The wine that stands apart on the left is the one dedicated to Max, with a price tag of $500. The other 3 sell for $25 to $40 depending on the source.
So the founder and his wife, and Ray Beckwith whose breakthroughs in the lab were a key element of the success of the early Granges and Bin reds, have to be satisfied with $40 wines. Quality-wise it’s in Koonunga Hill Seventy-Six territory, says The Winefront of one of these. Their scores are 91, 91 and 92+. So they charge $40 for a $20 wine. Is that all these hallowed names are worth?
Marketing is Rubbish
I’ve tasted Koonunga Hill 76 reds over the years, and they left the heights unscaled. So why insult the founders and the lab genius? This is supposed to be a tribute to those who made the biggest contributions to Penfolds’ success. And what marketing moron decided to throw one $500 wine and three $40 wines into the same special release?
There’s only one piece of good news here: they’ve thrown out the cheap Chinese Restaurant packaging of the Max’s range. Richard Farmer wrote years ago that Penfolds treated Max better when he was dead than when he lived. I’m not sure about that, not after the kitschy wrappers of the Max’s range, but their treatment of the great man at his retirement sure was despicable: they gave Max a Citizen watch when he retired after working for Penfolds all his life, not the Rolex he was hoping for.
Max retired in 1975, when Penfolds reds were forging a huge reputation for a company that still saw itself as a maker of port wine just 10 years earlier. This was the man who saved the company from certain ruin by revitalising its entire winemaking infrastructure back in the fitfties.
The Renegade?
Then they ran an ad campaign that framed him as a renegade, written by some airhead (and approved by a marketing manager) who didn’t understand the difference between a renegade and a maverick. More here: Max Schubert, Ray Beckwith and the Making of Penfolds.
Then again, Penfolds marketing has long been rubbish. ‘Treasury Wines are the Bogans of the Australian Industry,’ writes The Owl. ‘Penfolds in those [Max’s] days was a rather crass company that thought the epitome of entertaining clients was inviting them to watch St George run around playing rugby league. A glass or two of Minchinbury would be quite upmarket enough for Kogarah Oval, and Max Schubert’s name was not helping to sell winecasks.’
I remember years ago someone telling me that the wine list of the St George Leagues Club dining room always had several vintages of Grange on it, at lower prices than the sharpest retailers. Now I know why. Minchinbury became a housing estate decades ago, but the name has recently been rebirthed and now adorns some cheap wines at Dan Murphy’s, courtesy of The Pinnacle Drinks range. Pinnacle is owned by Woolworths, and it appears that it has acquired the hallowed brand.
More is Better
I haven’t thought about Penfolds for years, so I checked the website while I wrote this, and found that their collection of special wines had exploded. There must be close to 100 labels in the Penfolds Collection, where there used to be fewer than a dozen – Bin 707, Bin 389, St Henri, Bin 28 etc. – and the chintz has moved upmarket.
But that’s not all
Suddenly there’s a new range of brandies, which look a bit different from the Hospital Brandy of old. Perhaps Peter Gago has been told to churn out more products Penfolds can flog to the Chinese.
He’s even gone to Champagne to launch a JV with a house over there, for another range of bottles to make a buck out of – 280 bucks to be precise. Why on earth wouldn’t he team up with some of our makers and rebirth the Minchinbury label?
‘Penfolds today launched the first of its international explorations,’ wrote CM at the Winefront, ‘ a collaboration between itself and independent French house Champagne Thienot.’ That’s quite a clanger from a guy who has written so well for so long. But Gago tops that: ‘we’re hoping aspirationally that this project continues for a long time.’
The bottom line: ‘The genius is that Penfolds and Champagne go together in winemaking, marketing and world-domination terms like chocolate and cream. Prediction is that this collab will work spectacularly, if not in Australia then most definitely in “key markets”.’
Smart Wineries
Penfolds and Wynns share the same parent – TWE – but it’s easy to see that they’re adopted children because they couldn’t be more different. Everything Wynns has done has a touch of class, from the labels to the wines. You won’t find super-ripe reds here, pumped up with alcohol and oak, and you sure won’t find crass labels or packaging. Wynns and Penfolds are like Mercedes and HSV Holdens.
Wynns added new labels to their range, tasteful labels and just a handful of them. And the wines are distinctive as well. Wynns must have a different product manager from Penfolds. That’s a good thing, and I hope it doesn’t change anytime soon.
Wynns occasionally makes offers that are really attractive, and even their standard website prices aren’t much higher than those of the the big retailers. That’s pretty smart, and I wish more wineries would match the prices we find on main street.
Dappled
Selling direct to the public gives the wineries better returns. This used to be hard work in the tasting room but is less so online. In my recent survey of our top Chardonnays, I found the Dappled Appelation 2019 one of the best chardies you could buy for less than $50. Dappled was Halliday’s Best New Winery of 2018. There’s not a lot of this made, and most wine merchants have run out. It’s modern in style but avoids the grapefruit pith and some of the struck matches. It’s crystalline, seamless, nothing overdone, perfect pitch. Here’s the Winefront’s take on it:
‘Shaun Crinion of Dappled is under a fair amount of pressure to increase his prices – from various quarters – though he remains committed to keeping them as low as he possibly can. The prices will no doubt have to increase soon but they don’t offer extraordinary value for money by accident; Crinion is determined to keep them as accessible as possible. Personally I wish there were more winemakers like him.
‘This is another stellar release. It’s a wine of sheer quality, hands down. Flint, matchstick funk, pure nectarine-grapefruit-and-white-peach fruit, a ginger-like note and a smokiness through the finish. It has tremendous length and it feels uncompromised all the way along. Yes it’s flinty/funky but within that style it’s tremendous. And with air it just gets better. 95+ Points’, Campbell Mattinson, TWF
The price is $30 at the winery where you also get 10% off your first order, i.e. $27 a bottle. The discount code is ‘welcome’. I bought a 6-pack a month or two back, and now I bought another one. Easy as, like the young ones are fond of saying. I hope you can keep your prices on the sane side, Shaun. Penfolds Bin 311 2019 sells for around $50, and is not in the same class.
Many of you have told me that you buy directly from your favourite wineries, and grab some really good deals when they’re on offer. I can’t monitor wineries – there are 5000 of them – as well as wine merchants, but I’ll ask you to keep sharing the best deals with me please.