MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Excitement can get lost in welter of sameness
ON A recent trip to Australia I was invited to address a dinner at which six very fine and mature vintages of the legendary Penfold’s Grange were to be served. Since I had not forked out the R10,000 that paying guests had spent on the occasion, I considered myself the luckiest of the diners in the Harbour Room on the top floor of Sydney’s Intercontinental Hotel.I have tasted almost every vintage Grange produced (including all of those being served that evening), and while that doesn’t make me a Grange expert, I thought it qualified me to have an opinion on the subject.I fell in love with Grange when it was still affordable to rand-locked wine drinkers. Its fame had hardly spread beyond the Antipodes 25 years ago, and it was possible to buy it in London at prices which were substantially less than in Australia. In the early 1990s I found a bottle for about £20 — which probably translated into R100. (Today a current release would cost you upwards of R6,000). It was a style of wine I h...
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