Penfolds Reserve Bin A Adelaide Hills Chardonnay 2024
- 95
- $125
- Drink by: 2025-2035
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Bin A is sourced from the Adelaide Hills. It enjoys full barrel fermentation, part of which is with natural yeasts, as well as regular bâtonnage and 100% malolactic. Maturation was for eight months in French oak barriques, half of them new and 20% just a year old. This vintage requires some time in the glass for Bin A’s free-spirited typicity to emerge. The wine is a straw lemon hue and more elegant than is usual. It is balanced and yet intense at all times. This is a quality Chardonnay, with hints of lemons and grapefruit, peaches and nutty, cashewy oak. There is a hint of gun smoke and minerality and, as it opens up with time in the glass, we see that richer, more exotic nature of Bin A. A brightness is always evident, as is the very fine acidity, all leading to a lingering finish. Worth giving it three or four years in the cellar and then enjoying over the next decade.
Ken was born and bred in Brisbane, Queensland. He had a non-trendy, perfectly happy childhood, in a family convinced alcohol meant instant condemnation to Hades. But a break fishing on the Great Barrier Reef, and some good wine, started a serious obsession that eventually took over. It did not stop Ken being chastised later for drinking Pol champagne, disgusted he’d drink anything made by a Cambodian dictator. Now, Ken mostly writes on wine, champagne and spirits for various newspapers, magazines and books, but is perhaps best known for his work in The Courier Mail. He also has a little sideline writing on cigars, fishing, travel and food. When not writing, fly-fishing for trout in NZ or bonefish on the flats of Cuba, travelling or smoking cigars, he is no doubt following a variety of sporting teams – the occasionally glorious Queensland Reds rugby, the dysfunctional Washington Redskins, the dodgy Arsenal and especially revels in the world restored to its proper axis with the return of the Ashes to their rightful home.
