The Perfect Grange was off to an imperfect start today
Today, Grange 2008 was finally offered for sale to the public, along with Penfolds’ other icons and luxury goods. ‘Rock stars, restaurateurs and loyal mum and dad fans rubbed shoulders at the cold crack of an Adelaide dawn this morning,’ News Ltd reported, ‘ waiting for celebrated winemaker Peter Gago to open the Magill Estate doors and officially pull the first cork on the much anticipated Penfolds 2008 Grange.’
A few hours later, Fairfax media reported that ‘a price war has broken out among retailers hoping to lure buyers of the “perfect” 2008 Penfolds Grange with the lowest over-the-counter price.’ Dan Murphy’s started the war at $669, and then dropped the price to $649.99 to match Costco. Even the normally sensible Winestar got into the act with a $679.99 offer.
Grange and Toilet Paper
‘Costco Docklands’ allotment of 78 Grange Hermitage bottles was selling steadily in Melbourne on Thursday morning,’ Fairfax reported. ‘By 11am, 32 bottles had been sold … An assistant manager at Costco, Nick Weller, said sales had been “fantastic”. “Hopefully by lunch or a bit after we should be through them”, he said. Tins of bakes beans, bottles of wine – they’re all the same to the folks at Costco. READ MORE
In that post, we asked ‘Why on earth would Penfolds sell Australia’s most iconic wine to the bulk merchants and allow them to discount it, damaging the brand in the process? The answer: Because Penfolds relies on those same retailers to shift pallets of its cheap wines.
The next question was: why would people go to a ghastly bulk warehouse in the outer burbs to buy Grange? The answer is that Costco has found ways of attracting more affluent consumers than lower-income shoppers. Goods like Grange, it seems, are the bait that drags them in.
Even at $650 for perfect Grange, you’ll be lucky to get your money back
The notion that Grange appreciates in value over time is rubbish. In our post Penfolds Grange – rich wine, poor investment, we gave this advice: Never buy Grange at the time of its release. Why not? Because you can buy virtually any vintage of Grange, back to the early seventies, for less than the current retail price.Except for exceptional and rare vintages,’ auctioneer Mark Wickman tells us, ’most Grange sells between $300 and $500 and, yes, that is less than you pay for it on release.
Even the only perfect Grange I’ve ever tasted, the 1976, even at its now perfect maturity, sells for $540 – $700 at auction. Another option is to buy 2 bottles of the not quite so perfect but very good and ready-to-drink 1982 Grange for just $700 at auction.
So just sit back and wait a spell, if you want to buy the 2008 Grange at the right price. Is this another perfect Grange? Lisa Perotti-Brown at the Wine Advocate thinks so, but Adelaide wine scribe Tony Love gives it 96.
A Sense of Perspective
Ralph Kyte-Powell is spot on when he says: ‘Assessing one vintage as better than another is difficult with a big, brawny, oaky, impenetrable, unevolved red wine like Grange. In my experience, vintage differences across most years probably don’t reveal themselves until the wines are twenty-plus years old, despite the fact that a lot of noise is made by some commentators about the relative merits of different vintages as young wines.’
Campbell Mattinson is another of that lofty group of wine writers, along with James Halliday, Tyson Stelzer and a handful of others, who’ve tasted all the Granges ever made back to 1952. It’s a bit like that elite group of mountain climbers who’ve reached the top of Everest without oxygen.
‘Is the 2008 the best yet,’ Campbell asks, ‘as indicated by the awarding of the label’s first perfect score by American publication Wine Advocate? It’s undoubtedly superb, but then so are so many of its predecessors that the 2008 wouldn’t be in my top five. Tellingly, it would be in the top 15. The 2010, due in two years, is already touted as another “best ever” in a long line of them.’
Mattinson quotes Nick Stamford, managing director of wine auction house MW Wines, who calls the 2008 Grange ‘the most hyped vintage since 1998. That’s mostly because Wine Advocate scored it 100 out of 100, followed by Penfolds rushing through a price increase of more than $100 per bottle.’
Stamford then tells Mattinson what I’ve been saying for years: ‘Truly great vintages, now entering their prime drinking window (such as 1986, 1990, 1991 and 1996), can be obtained on the secondary market for hundreds of dollars less than the RRP on the 2008 release. I know where my drinking and investment money will go.’ Enough said?
$700 buys a lot of great wine
Other wine writers have had fun working out what they’d spend $700 on if they had it to spend. 3 bottles of Krug champagne is one suggestion, 6 bottles of Giaconda Shiraz another. I’d probably go for a few bottles of great Barolo, like Jenny Port, or maybe a few of Brunello di Montalcino. These are more interesting reds in many way.
Then again, I’d probably be happy with a couple of dozen of Kym Teusner’s great reds, and a dozen reds from O’Leary Walker. That wouldn’t consume half the $700, so I’d try to track down more of that superb Pewsey Vale Riesling 2006 at auction or buy another case of that lovely Mountadam Chardonnay 2010, the one that beat the Penfolds Yattarna in a London tasting last year. Or I could just buy 2 bottles of Grange 1982 – one of the better Granges – at auction for the same price as one bottle of 2008 in the discount shops.
Kim