Michael Fridjhon: August 2007
At the time, Rhône wines were almost off the radar screen. Notwithstanding Saintsbury's enthusiasm, the rest of the world seemed to have lost any sense of the region, or the potential greatness of Shiraz. A year later I visited the area twice, and imported wines like single vineyard Hermitage from Delas - and I still have some with price stickers of R6.95.
Initially the Northern Rhône was a hard sell. South Africa had virtually no Shiraz of any quality in the marketplace: Podlashuk's Bellingham was the first commercial offering, followed in the mid-1970s by the extraordinary 1970 Fleur du Cap Vintage, the wonderful Nederburg Auction 1976, some Fairview and Montagne (Hartenberg) bottlings and then the Zonnebloem selection. Shiraz and the Rhône persisted for some time as something of a discount proposition - we were told to expect the wine to smell "leathery" or (for those familiar with the aroma) of "sweaty saddles".
No one in the Cape had a sense of what the variety was capable of - given the extent to which local material was hopelessly virus-infected. I first tasted Australian Shiraz in 1979 - when Hugh Williams, then in charge of Davis Gelatine (an Australian-owned company in South Africa) showed me a sample of the Bailey's Bundarra Shiraz his parent company had acquired (seemingly by default). I had no idea that a wine could be so intense, and so concentrated. On my first trip to Australia a year or two later, I sought out Shiraz ahead of anything else.
By the end of the decade, I had sampled enough to know that Penfolds Grange justified its iconic status. So when I received a note - in the mid-1990s - that a great Australian collector, Anders Josephson, was hosting a tasting of every vintage ever produced, I booked and flew to Sydney for the historic event. I had no real sense of what I was in for - Australia was just emerging from its "cringe" era. Even my friends in Australia - James Halliday and Len Evans - were pleased that someone had made the effort to pay homage at the shrine of Grange.
Josephson was extraordinarily generous, arranging great accommodation in Sydney, dining with me at Neil Perry's Rockpool and including me in the party that flew in a sea plane from Rose Bay to his residence on Lake Macquarie.
Presented with 40 consecutive vintages of Grange - from the first trials, through the so-called "hidden" years (when Max Schubert had been told to cull the programme) to the 1990 - was one of the great wine tasting experiences of a lifetime. While this makes it difficult to pick out a single, stellar example, the memory of the 1953 is still hauntingly fresh: so vibrant after 40 years, so profoundly infused with the aromas of the forest floor, sweet-fruited yet fungal, tarry yet luminous, dank and yet bright.
Grange is not Hermitage - it begins as raspberry, rather than pepper, and acquires texture and richness when great Rhône evolves into finesse and spice. It is on another side of the Shiraz spectrum, robust, sumptuous, mesmerising, but no one who loves red wine should go to the grave before tasting a great bottle - in the midst of its long plateau of maturity.
