The Australian wine company was founded in 1844 and although now part of the multinational Fosters Group, it continues to build on its legacy, both from the founder, Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold and the famed winemaker Max Schubert (1915-1994) who, influenced by a trip to Europe, developed Penfolds Grange Hermitage.
Penfolds wines are made for cellaring: they develop, mature, and change with age. To help its customers, some of whom collect vintage after vintage of certain lines, every few years the company publishes The Rewards of Patience, a book assessing how each vintage is progressing, offers recorking clinics for old wines - the corks often deteriorate before some of the longer-lived wines are at their best - and now it has introduced the single-bottle dinner concept to New Zealand. These have been held in the US and Australia for a couple of years.
Enthusiasts bring a bottle of Penfolds red from their cellars to share at a dinner at an exclusive restaurant, and talk to winemakers. Recently Penfolds held single-bottle dinners at the French Cafe in Auckland, Logan Brown in Wellington and Pescatore in Christchurch.
About 40 people attended the Christchurch dinner, bringing various bottles with the characteristic red capsules, which were labelled, opened and checked, and sorted into flights. Of the 40 wines brought, only one turned out to be corked, according to Jamie Sach, Penfolds ambassador.
At the table I was at, several wines from the smart 1990 vintage turned up - a rich and charming Bin 389, a Bin 920, made only every eight or 10 years, a Grange 1990 (still a youthful wine), a savoury Bin 707. A 1967 Bin 7 was the oldest.
But perhaps the most interesting were two mystery wines brought by Prof Ivan Donaldson, founder of Pegasus Bay, which had two of the winemakers - as well as the rest of us - puzzled.
They turned out to be Bin 128 Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon 1974 and 1998, which cost between $5 and $7 at the time. They were certainly drinking deliciously and holding their own with some of the more expensive wines.
Chef Reon Hobson served an unusual menu, with unexpected contrasts of flavour and texture, but which married well with the wines.
Snapper with watermelon, goats cheese, green olives and a foam went particularly well with the Yattana Chardonnay, and with the assortment of older reds, butter-tender venison coated with ash from winebarrels with mushroom salad and smoked celeriac, or a simple dish of dried duck bresaola, dried and salted, with tiny, crisp potato slivers, dried raspberries and sherry caramel.
The most unusual was the dessert of lumps of hokey pokey with chocolate mayonnaise and parsnip ice cream, which surprisingly went deliciously well with Penfolds Great Grandfather fine old tawny port.
