MANILA, Philippines — Talking with Joshua Yim, the luxury sales manager for Penfolds International, is like looking through a glass of full-bodied red in the light: you see depths there, deep tannins, and swirls of knowledge.
As he walks us through three glasses of the best-selling Penfolds 389 Cabernet Shiraz — starting with 2021, then back to 2002 and 1994 — over a sumptuous feast at No. 8 China House in Grand Hyatt, BGC, you keep discovering things.
For instance, why the Penfolds 389 is so popular, and so collectible.
For that, Yim takes us back to the award-winning Penfolds Grange, created by Max Shubert in 1960, aged in American oak to combine the structure of cabernet sauvignon with the richness of shiraz. It was an iconic winner that held up for decades, fetching as much as $157,000 a bottle in 2021.
Now, the Penfolds 389 Cabernet Shiraz, often referred to as “Baby Grange” because components of the wine are matured in the same barrels that held the previous vintage of Grange, takes its place as a readily quaffable red with a judicious balance of fruit and oak that — as we found during a lunch tasting — just gets better with age.
We enjoyed a Cantonese combination of roasted duck barbecued pork, jellyfish and air-dried beef with the 2021, which was a plucky pairing with the 2021 in our “vertical tasting” (as opposed to “horizontal,” perhaps?).
Then we moved to the 2002 paired with the braised Angus beef with angelica herb, topped with a pungent dark soy sauce, tomato and almonds. The 2002, aged now for over two decades in American oak Grange barrels, is more structured and pronounced than the younger vintage: you can hear the distant clarion call of even more flavors in this one.
With a bowl of fried noodles, vegetables and oyster sauce, we tipped back the Penfolds 389 Cabernet Shiraz from 1994, and this was the full expression: it hit all the notes of oak — vanilla, tobacco, licorice — in a structured, balanced, full-bodied expression that seems like a logical endpoint. Perhaps only the original Grange bottles (nearly impossible to come by) offer a comparison.
Yim calls it “a formidable wine,” and part of the reason must be that the Baby Grange has the “Grange DNA.” That’s probably why the Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz is one of Australia’s most collected wines, and a high point for Schubert who began the Penfolds estate in 1844 and by 1951 was conducting his famed “Grange trials,” expanding the potential of his winery through cross-varietal and multi-regional blending. Warmer-climate fruit was key to this experimenting: since the mid-1990s, Bin 389 has drawn fruit from around South Australia, including Barossa Valley, Coonawarra, Padthaway, McLaren Vale, Langhorne Creek, Wrattonbully, Clare Valley and Robe. Exacting standards for ripeness, classic Penfolds winemaking methods and strict classification of wines after maturation have retained its consistency.
Yim gets philosophical as we wind back through the decades of Bin 389:
“As wine ages, the tannins soften,” he notes. “It loses a bit of that color as well. I always tell people, just think of a young person and an older person in terms of energy level: it decreases. That’s how wine tends to be as well. But it becomes more elegant and softer, gets wiser, more full of knowledge.”
This wine is full of knowledge.
The Malaysian-born Singaporean, a Certified Sommelier with the Court of Master Sommeliers, spoke about French versus American oak, and why Penfolds’ robust blends tend to thrive in American oak (“French oak tends to be more spice-driven — you have a little vanilla, but cardamom, things like that — while American oak gives more of the pungent, dark chocolate, coconut, vanilla, licorice qualities. You wouldn’t put a Pinot Noir in American oak, for instance.” It requires more delicate coaxing. Just ask Miles from Sideways.)
The question of reds with fish came up, and Yim was open-minded: “You can actually pair seafood dishes with red wine, you just have to be very careful, be more creative. So if you have, say, fatty dishes like tuna belly, or a charred fish, you can pair it with a red wine. You just want to be very careful to always match with the body of the wine.” One other pro tip: “If you have, say, squid, which doesn’t really have that umami, oceanic flavor, if you char it, you can actually pair it with a Penfolds St. Henri Shiraz, because it tends to be a bit more elegant, there’s no new oak that’s used, it tends to be softer, a bit more floral, that pairs very well with charred octopus.”
Day drinking never got this informative.
* * *
Purchase Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz at select fine wine retail shops in Philippines.