Penfolds: choosing wine that travels well

I love travel; I love wine. When you combine the two, you get moments where someone pours a wine and it feels like the whole place is captured in that glass – the culture, the food, the people…

I’ve stayed with David Guimaraens, the technical director of the Taylor’s port group, at the Quinta de Vargellas, right alongside the Douro River, which is still used to transport the wine to the warehouses in Porto. It’s a wonderful old place that has produced port since the 1820s. They stick with tradition – slaughter their own pigs, make bread and olive oil. Visiting places like this – where people are producing the very best of their product – can be very moving and it adds something to the wine.

I went to Champagne last year and was invited to some crayères – the underground limestone caves where they store the wine. I drank excellent blanc de blancs, touching the same chalk in which the chardonnay vine grows so well. In the Barossa Valley in South Australia, we tend our Penfolds Block 42 Kalimna vineyard, with the oldest continually producing Cabernet Sauvignon vines in the world. You can really taste that age, the soil and an underlying purity.

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However, we’ve all bought a wine we’ve loved on holiday at cellar door, taken it home, only to find that, without the experience of the place, it is not as good as we remember. The hedonism of the experience – sensual stimuli such as the aroma of herbs on the breeze, the room, the company, the music – has a huge effect on a wine. This is why, when we’re tasting for work, we go into a white air-conditioned room, taste quietly, clinically, with nothing contextual or emotive that will affect our judgement.

Travel is something to minimise for wines. Ideally you should travel to the wine. The perfect cellar is one at 13-15°C, with minimal fluctuation in temperature, humidity over 80 per cent, no background odour, no vibration and ideally in darkness. As soon as you put wine on a truck, unload it onto a quayside… all of this breaks some of those rules.

Over time, odours will permeate through a cork. Let’s remember the ageing of a wine is a chemical reaction. By increasing temperature, you speed up that reaction. Increase temperature in the fixed volume of a bottle and you increase the pressure. That can lead to leakage and then oxidation.

Some wines do travel better than others because of their internal chemical and physical make-up. More expensive wines tend to travel better than cheaper ones, just as they give you less of a hangover as the winemaker is not overpressing, extracting harsher phenolics. They will generally have better fruit, substrate and character, pH balance and internal buffering. Younger wines, full of primary fruit and extract (sugars, tannin), handle travel better than older, more delicate wines. And, like with humans, when they finish that travel, their recovery time is longer.

Different vintages of a wine travel differently, too. Our 1971 Grange is legendary, beautifully multifaceted, but there is a fragility to it; it doesn’t handle travel well. But the ’76 – if you dropped it off a tall building (and somehow the bottle survived), you wouldn’t know from the wine.

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Peter Gago has been the chief winemaker at Penfolds since 2002. Born in South Shields, he emigrated to Australia aged five. 'I thank my parents: I don't think I'd be making wine on the Tyne.'