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JAZZ WINES MESSAGE:
Fabulous Jazz and Wine Reception with Thanks
Jan 15

PROUD SPONSORS:


ISA International
Shiraz Alliance
shirazalliance.com


WBGO Jazz FM in New York, New Jersey and on the web at WBGO.org


JAZZ WINES COLLABORATION:
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Penfolds Talent

According to the Penfolds’ web site, Max Schubert said, ”All winemakers should possess a good fertile imagination if they are to be successful in their craft.”

The company describes this singular talent as “one of the wine industry’s greatest innovators. He believed that wine is a living thing - that it develops and ages in the bottle, but that it also has a life cycle like any living creature.”

The winery describes his philosophy as follows: “It’s so essential that a winemaker give some of his personality to his wine. His personality is part and parcel of the wine itself. The greatest wines have implanted in them the ideas of the winemaker as to what they should be. His character is part of the wine”.

Praise for the Grange

The Grange has won an unprecedented number of awards for wines from Australia, putting it among the world's most sought after and collected.

The winemaking approach nurtured by Max Schubert also laid the ground for a high quality standard and practice that was further developed by a number of his students including John Duval. John in turn has passed on the methods in recent years to Peter Gago.

Winery

Penfolds Wines

"He was no more perfect than any of us, but he went as close to creating perfection in wine as anyone is ever likely to do,” said James Halliday, describing the inventor of the iconic Penfold’s Grange, Max Schubert.

Max Schubert - Penfolds Photo

In 1931, at the age of sixteen, Max Schubert joined Penfold’s as a message boy. Seventeen years later he was the chief winemaker, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1975.

The tectonic shift that would change not only his life but the future path of wine, happened in 1950 when Max Schubert traveled to Bordeaux. He met his mentor Christian Cruse, a well-known old-time Bordeaux winemaker. It was Cruse who introduced Max to the potential of brilliant, individual, and long lasting wines, when the two tasted some classic fifty-year-old vintages.

Max Shubert returned to the Outback and the fledgling Australian wine industry which, at the time, was producing mostly sweet wines. He carried a budding vision of making great wine in the grade he had experienced in Bordeaux with what was available in Australia: Shiraz.

Using premium grapes from two selected vineyards, Schubert reduced the temperature during fermentation, slowing the process to achieve maximum extraction from the fruit. He then aged the grapes in small, new oak barrels. These innovations were doubted at first, but they were part of the magic that would produce outstanding full-bodied wines.

“In retrospect, the 1950’s were exciting years of discovery, faith, doubt, humiliation, and triumph” Schubert said, at a speech given in 1975 to a wine symposium.

The initial uncertainty, expense and unease of his superiors was overwhelming. And in 1957, Schubert was ordered to stop producing the Grange.

“No one liked it and I was having misgivings about my own assessment of the Grange,” said Schubert.

Luckily for us, Schubert ignored the instructions and pressed on, secretly producing small amounts of the Grange with almost no budget. The Grange was a wine designed to improve with age. Slowly, rumors of the wine’s emerging quality filtered back to his bosses. And in 1967 Schubert was again given orders from head office; this time it was for full production, and on a full budget.

Luckily...Schubert ignored the instructions and pressed on

It took ten years of dedication to his vision for Grange to be generally accepted as a quality wine and forty years for it to gain the international reverence it would deserve. But from his untrained beginnings, Max Schubert showed what innovation, dedication and imagination of a great winemaker could accomplish.

References

The Story of the Grange. (1979) delivered by Max Schubert A.M. at the first Australian National University Wine Symposium held in Canberra, Australia.