PENFOLDS | Bin 28 | Kalimna | Shiraz | 2013
syrah

WineStatistics will be evaluating wines in no particular order on no particular schedule. Just stay tuned and you will never miss one. If the wine is tasted more than once, the rating table will be updated so as to reflect all the new impressions and observations. The logic is simple – the more we taste, the more we learn.

The wine we are going to review tonight hardly requires any introduction, yet, just in case you were leaving under a rock for the last decade, let us introduce you to this one – Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz 2013 by Penfolds, which is one of Australia’s most famed and respected winemakers. Bin 28 represents a point of reference for australian syrah wines (or ‘shiraz’ as they are called there) – ripe, robust and generously flavoured. This wine is named after the famous Barossa Valley‘s ‘Kalimna Vineyard’ from which the wine was originally sourced. Today though, Bin 28 is a multi-region, multi-vineyard blend, as grapes are harvested from the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Padthaway and Langhorne Creek. But let’s not put too much emphasis on the theory – on to the tasting!
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Take a look at the tasting notes below and our detailed assessment of the wine:

Visual
Noble and deep garnet color, with opaque crimson shades towards the rim of the glass.

Olfactory
The nose is strong, filled mostly with black fruits and spicy flavours: black cherry, black plum, blackcurrant, black mulberry, ripe black raspberry, overripe sour cherry, sundried oakwood, dried plum and black tea. An instant later the nose is filled with elegant notes of black pepper, sweet tobacco, nutmeg, red pepper, anise, black chocolate, cherry seeds and some nunced hints of roasted oakwood.

Gustatory
The wine is dry, with high alcohol level, high acidity and ripe tannin. It feels firm, spicy and extracted, with a quite complex body and a nuanced fruity accent, supported by fine-grained tannins. This is a velvety, elegant and seedy wine, which has a nuanced new-world profile, as it tastes ripe, robust and generously flavoured. The wine has a good overall balance and it feels warm and refined, with an appealing spiciness on the palate, with sensitive yet apparent hints of oak.

Aftertaste
It has a long finish and a balanced, tannic-spicy aftertaste of a quite persistent length.
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This is definitely a great Wine of Australia and the overall rating says the same, with 92.5 points scored it is right there, among the best wines we’ve tasted so far. Please click on the chart icon on the left in order to get to the wine rating page, where you can find all the wines we’ve tasted to date.

Conclusion: this is definitely a great syrah wine in its prime form – expressive, elegant and expansive – a wine that can still resist another 2 to 3 years of bottle ageing despite its advanced age. It has been aged for 12 months in seasoned american oak hogsheads, as a result the wine displays an immersion of flavour saturation across the palate, with mouth-coating fine tannins. For the best experience, we recommend to pair this wine with spicy, roasted beef-based gastronomy, like for example a peppery tomahawk rib-eye steak or some spicy beef skirt steak cuts, so that the spiciness in the dish will be nicely complemented by the expressiveness of the wine itself. Cheers!

WineStatistics tasting results:

PENFOLDS
Bin 28 | Kalimna | Shiraz | 2013

grape: | syrah |

region: Australia | Barossa Valley

overall rating: | 92.5 |

maturity: in its prime

conclusion: excellent | (a must try)

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(c) The WineStatistics ratings are based solely on our own knowledge of the world of wine and on our personal wine tastes, which may, or may not, differ from yours – the reader. There are no absolutes of right and wrong in wine appreciation.