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Seventy-Five Years In The Glass — An Evening With Penfolds Grange, Kuala Lumpur
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Seventy-Five Years In The Glass — An Evening With Penfolds Grange, Kuala Lumpur

Penfolds marks three-quarters of a century of Grange with a vertical tasting dinner in Four Seasons, Kuala Lumpur — four vintages, a kitchen that kept pace, and a quiet reminder of why the wine refuses to be ordinary.

by
July 13, 2026
Fernando Fong
In Brief
  • Penfolds Grange, celebrating 75 years since its 1951 debut, has earned over 37 perfect scores from the world's leading critics.
  • A vertical tasting dinner in Kuala Lumpur showcased four Grange vintages, including the 1983, paired with a bespoke menu.

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There are wines that age well, and then there is Grange.

Since Max Schubert produced his first experimental vintage in 1951 — inspired by a trip to Lisbon and Bordeaux the year before, and a conviction that Australia could make something built to last — Penfolds’ flagship has accumulated more than 37 perfect scores from the world’s leading critics, an unbroken lineage of vintages, and a reputation that has outlasted every trend in fine wine.

Seventy-five years is a long time to be right.

Schubert’s vision was not immediately embraced — yet the man who joined Penfolds as its first chief winemaker in 1948, held that role until 1975, and went on to define Grange and establish the house as one of the world’s leading wineries had, it turned out, been right all along.

The wine the German imagined — full-bodied, deeply structured, capable of decades in the cellar — ran against the grain of what Australian winemaking was doing in the early 1950s; he made it anyway.

What followed was a quiet accumulation of firsts.

The 1990 Grange was named Wine Spectator‘s Wine of the Year; the 2001 vintage earned the same distinction from The Wall Street Journal.

Then came 2008 — the vintage that made history as the first Australian wine to receive a perfect 100 points from both Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate, simultaneously.

The 2012 vintage earned 100 points from Andrew Caillard MW; the 2018 has since joined it, earning multiple perfect scores globally.

Thirty-seven perfect scores across seventy-five years; roughly one every two years, across different critics, different decades, different definitions of what great wine should be.

The reception space at Four Seasons before dinner — red light, cocktail tables, and the quiet hum of a room that knew what it was there for.
A guest in a white shirt, arms folded, studying a neon Grange installation — the script rendered in light, a bottle behind glass. It had the quality of someone reading a very old letter very carefully.
Five men at the Grange 75 wall — left to right, the evening’s hosts and guests of honour. Second from left: Datuk Kenneth Soh of Luen Heng. Third from left: Peter Gago, the present Chief Winemaker at Penfolds. Behind them, the neon reads 1951 to 2026. Seventy-five years, in one photograph.
A Penfolds red, the room behind it — everything in focus that needed to be, everything else already falling away. The first act had begun.
The opening act arrived dressed entirely in red. Not an accent colour, not a theme — red as a statement of intent. Cocktail tables dotted the reception floor, each carrying a single glass. Silhouettes moved through the warm light, unhurried.
Gago in the reception — glass in hand, mid-laugh, the room moving around him. For a man whose wine has been accumulating perfect scores for decades, he wore the evening lightly.

South Australia’s Finest, Poured In Sequence

To mark the anniversary, Penfolds hosted celebratory wine-and-food pairing dinners in Kuala Lumpur — a vertical-tasting format with a bespoke menu designed to pair with the wine’s structure and evolution over time.

The dinners were an exercise in contrast: younger vintages against older ones, the same wine in different chapters of its life.

It is the format Grange rewards most.

A wine built on multi-regional sourcing and blending — drawing only from South Australia’s finest fruit each season — does not reveal itself in a single glass.

It asks for patience and then delivers.

The dinner format was a vertical tasting: four vintages of Grange, served in sequence alongside a bespoke menu designed to move with the wine rather than against it. Before the vertical began, a lineup of bottles was set out — multiple Grange vintages standing alongside the Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay 2019, the white that would open the evening.
The meal opened with a Sea Trilogy: saffron risotto, butter-poached Boston lobster, pan-seared Hokkaido scallop, octopus tentacles, pecorino foam, and caviar — paired with the Yattarna. A white to open. A deliberate reset of the palate before the Shiraz arrived.
The table stretched the length of the hall — red florals running its full length, rows of glasses at every place, the vertical tasting about to begin. At the far end, Gago stood on stage, the Grange 75 screen filling the wall behind him: white script, red ground, 1951 to 2026. The guests in the foreground leaned into conversation, glasses already in hand. Nobody was looking at their phone.
At the podium stood Joshua Yim, Penfolds’ Brand Ambassador for Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and North Asia. A certified sommelier who has spent years conducting VIP masterclasses and hosting vertical tastings of rare vintages across the region — including the introduction of the Penfolds French Collection to Kuala Lumpur.
The full length of the dinner — red florals running its spine, glasses lined up on both sides, the Penfolds Grange branding filling the wall behind. Collectors, trade, media: a room that had earned its seat at the table, in every sense. The vertical tasting was about to begin, and nobody looked like they intended to rush it.

The Ambition Was Answered, The Work Continues

Penfolds has been making wine for over 180 years.

Grange has existed for fewer than half of those — yet it has come to define the house entirely.

That is the quiet achievement the anniversary marks: not just longevity, but relevance.

The 2018 Grange is as discussed, as debated, and as sought after as any vintage that came before it.

Schubert’s original ambition — an Australian red with the cellaring potential of Europe’s greats — has long since been answered.

The question Grange now poses is a different one: what does the next 75 years look like?

The winemaking team at Penfolds, custodians of a wine they did not create but are trusted to carry forward, are already working on the answer.

Between the glasses and the red florals, a guest mid-conversation — the kind of evening where the wine gives people something to talk about, and the room does the rest.
The main course matched the weight of what was in the glass: grilled Wagyu beef tenderloin, pulled beef potato pavé, sautéed baby carrot, charred broccolini, morel jus, shaved truffle. The kitchen understood its assignment.
Grange 1983 — the oldest vintage of the evening, identified by a red card beneath the glass. Forty-three years in the bottle, poured in Kuala Lumpur in July 2026. The vertical had to start somewhere. It started here.
The toast — Yattarna in hand, the Penfolds Grange label projected large behind them, red florals running the length of the table. The vertical hadn’t even reached the reds yet. Nobody minded starting with white.
The 802.B Superblend itself — held up against the room’s red ambient light, its embossed crest detailed enough to warrant a second look — sits outside the Grange lineage but within the same house philosophy: blending as craft, not compromise. It is a wine built to be held rather than shelved. The guests who held it seemed to understand that.
Gago signs a commemorative Penfolds book for a guest — phone cameras raised, Yim looking on from behind. The signature is a small thing. The name on the cover is not.

All photographs were taken by the writer.

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