‘Max Schubert was a man of the people, an unpretentious, even humble man, who was bemused by the success of his most famous creation, Penfolds Grange Hermitage, and even more so by the prices paid for it, and the way it was captured by collectors and speculators.’ Huon Hooke.
‘Since the beginning, Penfolds has been looking to the stars,’ says the landing page for this red rocket. ‘Dreaming of what could be beyond. Our new limited edition rocket tin celebrates this pioneering spirit of going beyond, rather than accepting the status quo.’
Get the Penfolds side of the story HERE, and make sure you scroll down to the video. You’ll ask yourself: Is it a Space X rocket? Is it a NASA space shuttle? No, it’s a bottle of Penfolds red. What’s it doing in a tin rocket?
Remember when Penfolds released its 2004 Block 42 Kalimna Cabernet 10 years ago
in a hand-blown glass ampoule, suspended by a bespoke glass plumb-bob in a wooden Jarrah cabinet? Only 12 were made of this ‘beautiful, thoughtful, unique objet d’art, designed to store wine in an ideal environment.’
‘The ampoule also provides a truly memorable experiential and sensory engagement,’ the press release added. ‘When a decision is made to open the [$168,000] ampoule, a senior member of the Penfolds winemaking team will travel to the destination of choice, where it will be ceremoniously removed from its glass plumb-bob casing and opened using a specially designed, tungsten-tipped, sterling silver scribe-snap.
The winemaker will then prepare the wine using a beautifully crafted sterling silver tastevin.’
We assume that the Penfolds winemaker will also blow your nose and wipe your bottom after the event, most likely with a handkerchief made from spun gold.
Marketing at Penfolds is a disaster area of long standing
‘Wine becomes just another vacuous totem of wealth,’ Decanter’s Andrew Jefford wrote, and compared creations like the Penfolds ampoule to ‘pointlessly complicated watches, tank-sized vehicles for urban use, houses which are never lived in and boats which spend the year bobbing about on their moorings.’
He added that he takes no issue with market forces that make rare wine unaffordable to many drinkers, but takes exception at marketing initiatives that ‘look so obviously like the fantasy of pale people who have spent too much time locked up in a room with glossy magazines.’
He also makes the point that ‘they [the pale people] are hilariously alien to the great Aussie traditions of piss-taking and pretension-popping,’ (which is what we’re doing here) and adds that turning fine wine into artificially exclusive luxury goods damages the brand.
‘No First Growth in Bordeaux or top Burgundy domain would contemplate anything this silly,’ he argues, ‘they leave that kind of ludicrous marketing excess to the bubble-brained Champenois, where form regularly eclipses content.’ Read the full post here.
Marketing Genius or End-of-Empire Insanity?
How do you top a $168,000 extravaganza? With a £1.2 million, never-to-be-repeated Penfolds Collection: a flight of Granges from 1951 through to 2007.
Each of the Grange bottles comes signed by either Max Schubert, John Duval or Peter Gago (the current custodian of the Holy Grail). But wait, there’s more: a set of 13 magnums that includes the rare 2004 Bin 60A and the 2008 Bin 620 special bottlings. In addition, Penfolds will throw in one case of its icon and luxury wines every year for the next 10.
‘Gago believes this is probably the finest set of Penfolds wines ever to be assembled and sold,’ Decanter reports. ‘It is certainly the most expensive … Treasury Wine Estates have been aggressively re-positioning Penfolds icon range as a global luxury brand to capitalise on opportunities in newer markets such as China.’
Yes, China, and haven’t those pale people worked hard to make Penfolds’ reds attractive to Chinese folk down under and in China. What would Max think about his wines being wrapped in such chintzy, truly awful labels?
Max Schubert, the Renegade
Somewhere along the line, the pale people came up with a new angle: to paint Max Schubert as a renegade. What a shame they were too lazy to check a dictionary, which would have told them that renegade means ‘a person who deserts and betrays an organization, country, or set of principles.’
Max Schubert was unerringly loyal to Penfolds all his life – he worked for the firm for all of it – and always stuck to his principles. I suspect the word they were looking for is Maverick, which my dictionary describes as ‘an unorthodox or independent-minded person.’
The Blending Obvious
In 2017 Penfolds released the g3, a blend of 3 Grange vintages. Had Penfolds’ marketing minions run out of ideas for special bins? In the last couple of decades, Penfolds added a bunch of these, along with over 100 new labels.
‘Blending across vintages is part of Penfolds winemaking philosophy,’ Peter Gago told the media and referred to Penfolds’ Tawny ports, ‘famous in the mid-1800’s (they’re out by 100 years, but the lifestyle magazines didn’t pick that up) made by blending multiple vintages. ‘A natural progression was to apply this venerated technique to create a new Penfolds red style,’ said Gago.
This claim is fanciful at best, and cynical at worst as Gago well knows: Unlike vintage ports, tawny ports are blends of multiple vintages, and so are most champagnes. However, in both cases the single vintage wines fetch much higher prices than the blends because they’re only made in great vintages, in limited quantities.
I don’t know of any great reds in the wine universe that are blends of several vintages (although someone is bound to correct me). That said, the faithful snapped the up g3, and the g4 that followed in 2020. And then came the g5, an obvious move by Penfolds since it’s all money for jam.
Where do you get it? You can’t just walk into your local Dan Murphy’s and buy a 6-pack. Oh No, you have to go through an expression of interest process with Penfolds, where you might score a bottle or 2 if you’re fast enough. As John McEnroe yelled at the umpire: ‘You cannot be serious!’
The g5 is a five-vintage blend of Granges stretching back to 2010 that sells for $3500 a single 750 ml bottle. Is that it? YUP, that’s it. They pour bottles from 5 vintages into a vat, stir the blend and bottle it under a fancy new label. Then they sell it at 4 times the price of the current vintage Grange. Or 6 times the average auction price of the 2008 Grange, which scored 100 perfect points with Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate.
Is the blend of 5 recent vintages worth so much more than older vintages of Grange? And I’m talking about pitch-perfect Granges here such as the 1976, 1986, 1990, 1991 or 1996. Do you know that you can buy these FIVE vintages at auction for a total of $3500?
That’s right: 5 bottles of the best Granges made in the last 50 years for the same money as a single bottle of g5, or the same money as FOUR bottles of the current Grange 2017.
Sheer Genius
Perhaps I overlooked something here: the folks who buy Grange and the special Penfolds bottlings are a different breed from you and me: they don’t buy these wines to drink, they buy them as investments and to impress their friends.
Penfolds produced just 2,200 bottles of the g5 to make it a rare collector’s item, underscored by the expression of interest nonsense and the announcement that the g5 was the last ever rendition of multiple Grange blends. You and I might laugh at this nonsense, but the investors lapped it all up and coughed up the money.
Some wine merchants did as well, and now sell the g5 for $5,000. The package they come in provides the buyer with the most elaborate unboxing experience I’ve ever seen – check this video and listen to Peter Gago go into raptures about the packaging, with James Suckling watching his every move, trying hard not to break into raucous laughter https://youtu.be/Jd6tGhddG_o.
When these multi-vintage blends were snapped up by the faithful, Gago made more blends – and why wouldn’t he? Penfolds launched ‘Superblend’ 802-A Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2018 on an unsuspecting world in 2021, for the same price as the current Grange.
This was a double release – 802-A had a twin called Superblend 802-B. One was matured in American oak, the other in French. The labels don’t look like Penfolds labels; instead they suggest a split personality dressed in bleak medieval garb. Have the pale people lost their branding template?
Grange, the Musical
How do you top these bold marketing moves? There’s only one option: a $100,000 bespoke music cabinet with a valve amplifier and a Penfolds-branded turntable. Apparently Max was a music lover. Oh really? He’s been dead almost 30 years, and now someone remembers that he loved music?
What’s the Occasion? Ah yes, we’re celebrating 70 years of Grange. ‘Only seven individually crafted pieces have been produced globally (I think they mean in toto),’ says Penfolds, ‘paying homage to the “all in one” console design from the 1950s – the same decade Grange was first created by Max Schubert.’ More Here, and here’s the video
Postscript
I want to express my gratitude to Peter Gago, Penfolds and TWE for supplying us with so much fabulous material for piss-taking and pretension-popping. Most of the ideas made no sense to this marketing brain, but they clearly found a ready audience among the Penfolds faithful and other investors with money to burn.
Kim