When hemispheres meet: Penfolds Grange & La Chapelle

Anyone who knows Peter Gago, Penfolds’ chief winemaker, knows he has a glint in his eye. Today, however both are positively gleaming as he unveils the joint venture between Penfolds and Domaine de La Chapelle – a Syrah-Shiraz hybrid that breaks all existing codes and conventions. 

It’s late September 2024 and mid-to-late morning. We’re sat across a table in the Hotel de Crillon in Paris – famous for providing Marie Antoinette with her final night’s sleep before she was conveyed (at around about this time of day in fact) to the guillotine in la place de Concorde through the window behind me. 

I’m about to be let into a secret – a big secret – that I am going to have to keep until, well, today (9 February).

There’s a glass of wine in front of me – and Peter has just revealed to me what is in it. To his immediate right, my left, is Caroline Frey, La Chapelle’s chief winemaker. She already knows what’s in my glass as she has had just as much of a hand in the making of this as Peter Gago. 

So what am I about to taste? Something radically new. A joint venture between Penfolds and Domaine de La Chapelle. The wine is Grange La Chapelle (the 2021 vintage in fact) – a 50:50 blend of Syrah/Shiraz sourced from these two most iconic estates. At this point, I am one of just a tiny handful of people to know of this wine’s existence. Today I get to taste it. Tomorrow I get to try to forget that I’ve tasted it until its official release on the eve of Vinexpo Paris on the 9 February at La Monnaie de Paris. If I fail in my task my fate is likely to be very similar to that of Marie-Antoinette.

Decades in the making

The project is the product of a friendship, developed and sustained over several decades, between the properties, and icons of the northern and southern hemispheres Syrah and Shiraz respectively. As Caroline Frey tells me, Grange and La Chapelle have a long-standing history of being thought of and talked about together, of being served together and, as in a legendary early Master of Wine tasting, of being poured together. So it would seem logical that they would eventually come to share the same glass – the bottle on the table next to me and the smaller vessel now nestling in my hand.

But all of that makes this sound an easier and more natural and evident project than it is. For, let’s be clear. There is something almost wilfully iconoclastic about this. And the project – if not perhaps the wine itself – is likely to divide opinion. To take ageing barrels of Grange and La Chapelle and to redeploy them for another purpose is a far from self-evident thing to do – above all in producing a Syrah-Shiraz hybrid that breaks all existing codes, conventions and, of course, appellation rules. 

Peter Gago is typically clear about this, addressing the question head-on and with characteristic wit. He quotes Oscar Wilde, of course (I suspect, not for the first time): “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about”. Grange La Chapelle is a wine that will be talked about – a lot – and as much for the idea as for the execution of the idea.

The secret unveiled

To be honest, before tasting the wine I was, if not exactly sceptical, then certainly searching for further understanding. This is a wine that should perhaps be seen as a rare exception to almost all normal conventions and rules; and, call me old-fashioned, but I have no great problem with appellation rules. The world doesn’t necessarily need a proliferation of trans-hemispheric blends. But I am still intrigued – and, now, very happy to know – the level that a trans-hemispheric blend is capable of attaining. That level, as my tasting note below attests, is stratospherically high even in this, the wine’s first vintage. 

Grange La Chapelle is every bit as good as La Chapelle and every bit as good as Grange – but it also resembles neither. And that, in the end, is the best justification for its existence. If this were, as it so easily could have been and in some kind of parallel universe might have been, a subtle variation on the theme of Grange or a subtle variation on the theme of La Chapelle – a wine strongly marked by the personality of one or other of its component parts – then I would be much less convinced by the need for its existence than I am. 

What is staggering here is the sense of balance. When you think about it, this is a wine that couldn’t be less than 50 per cent Grange just as it couldn’t be less than 50 per cent La Chapelle. In short, there was not a great deal of choice as to its final composition (above all as the parts assembled come from the final blend of each of the component wines and not from a sub-selection). Put differently, it had to work as an equal blend, and it does. 

A collector’s dream

You can put that down to skill (and there’s a lot of technical skill on display here). You can put that down to chance (the luck of the brave, perhaps). Or you can put it down to fate (the idea that it was destined that these wines would come together in this form). In the end, we don’t really need to choose between them. But, for what it’s worth, I don’t see fate as playing too much of a role here. 

The 2021 is the first release; the 2022 is in bottle and the 2023 is in barrel. Needless to say, the production is tiny and the release smaller still – for, presumably, both properties will be holding back a certain amount of library stock. The wine will be distributed directly by a carefully selected group of 18 merchants who will in turn sell it on to no less carefully selected private customers. The Australian recommended retail price is $3500 per bottle and, in France, €2600.

Tasting note

Grange La Chapelle 2021 (50% Shiraz from Grange; 50% Syrah from La Chapelle; pH 3.70; 14% alcohol; the Grange was aged in 100% new oak, the La Chapelle in 20% new oak). Iconic in its iconoclasm. Definitively one wine not two parts and not exactly what one imagines it to be. This feels like it comes from a single vineyard, a single estate, a single region and a single hemisphere. Of course, it comes from none of these things. Already complete and incredibly harmonious, seemingly impossibly so, not least because one is searching for some kind of tension between the hemispheres. One finds none. The elements feel as though they have always been together, so finely interwoven, are they. And the key to that is the quality of the tannins and a certain similarity in their form and structure. The fruit is plump, plush, brambly and briary. There’s a little cedar, a hint of walnut oil and plenty of herbal lift. It’s fresh and vibrant, even in its slightly introspective youth, but always soft, suave, gracious, enticing and enveloping. It is luminous, crystalline and glistening in its plunge-pool cool glossy spherical core. I love the subtle floral hints – rose and lavender – that bring lift to the meatier notes – game and lièvre à la royale perhaps. The hemispheres meet but without the clash of tectonic plates. Not a one-night stand but a perfect match newly consummated. 99.

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