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For decades, many distinguished wineries have pitched their high-end wines as sourced from a single vineyard and even from selected parcels of vines from a particular vineyard. This has contributed to the mantra that their wines have a “sense of place,” already a hackneyed phrase in wine marketing. The thinking seems to be that the smaller the area grapes are sourced from, the better the wine they produce.
The term “flying winemaker” generally refers to winemakers who flit back and forth between the northern and southern hemispheres so as to make wine twice a year.
Australian winemaker Penfolds collaborates with Saint-Louis on a project to celebrate the winery’s latest release: its 2012 Grange in the very limited edition Imperial size (a six-litre bottle).
Officially listed as a Heritage Icon of South Australia, Grange boasts an unbroken line of vintages from the experimental 1951, and demonstrates the synergy between shiraz and the growing region’s soil and climate.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: Diamonds are forever, but corks are for 25 years. Well, sort of. In reality, of course, there’s no certainty about the longevity of a cork when it’s used for sealing a wine bottle; there are no actuarial tables for corks, and how long they last depends on variables like the quality of the cork and the conditions in which the bottle of wine is kept.
The world’s most expensive bottle of wine isn’t in a bottle. It’s aging in an elongated ampoule, within a hand-blown glass vessel called a vestibule. The shape of the vestibule is a stylized form of an amphora, the pottery jar—wide at the top and tapering to a point—that was used for centuries to store and ship wine in the ancient world.
Being offered a premium wine for $12 a bottle might sound a bit like being offered some prime swampland at a knock-down price. Premium has the ring of quality about it, and many people might well think of premium wines as including first-growth Bordeaux and Super Tuscans.
