Having studied medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold and his wife Mary made what was to be, a wise decision to purchase the 500 acres which was the Mackgill Estate. The initial wines from this fledgling estate were made from Grenache and prescribed as tonic wines for anaemic patients.
By 1870 several different grape varieties had been planted and the estate was producing both sweet and dry red wines along with white table wines – Penfold and Co – the partnership formed of Mary Penfold, her son-in-law Thomas Hyland and her cellar manager Joseph Gillard now claimed to be producing over one third of South Australia’s wine.
During the 1920’s and 30’s, Penfolds gained a remarkable reputation for its fortified wines and even produced an ‘Italian Red’ for the Italian immigrants working the cane fields of Queensland. By the 1940’s, Penfolds had acquired or planted vineyards in the Barossa Valley, Mclaren Vale, Griffith, The Hunter Valley and MInchinbury.
In the late 1940’s, Penfolds young winemaker experimented, after an investigative journey to Europe, with a long-lived red wine which he called Grange. In 1995, recognition came; Robert Parker, one of the world’s most influential wine critics stated that Grange was ‘a leading candidate for the richest, most concentrated dry table wine on planet Earth’. Grange was accepted and set an incomparable benchmark for longevity, concentration and balance.