One Canvas, Two Hands: Grange La Chapelle 2022.

There are wines that announce themselves as collaborations, and then there are wines that feel as though they have simply arrived. Grange La Chapelle 2022 belongs to the latter category. Its existence does not feel strategic or opportunistic. It feels preordained - as though the conditions that produced it had been quietly assembling for decades, waiting for the right year, the right people, and the restraint to let the idea speak softly.

At its core is a single variety - Syrah, or Shiraz, depending on geography - a grape that left its ancestral home centuries ago and learned to adapt, exaggerate, restrain, and reinvent itself. Over time, it became bilingual, then bicultural. In the Rhône, it grew inward and architectural; in Australia, expansive and unapologetic. Grange La Chapelle does not attempt to collapse these identities into a compromise. Instead, it allows them to stand side by side, intact, in tension - like two voices harmonising without surrendering their accents.

That this reunion occurred at all owes less to ambition than to curiosity. Caroline Frey of La Chapelle and Peter Gago of Penfolds Grange did not set out to “create a statement wine.” They asked a question most winemakers would consider heretical: what if two of the most mythologised terroirs in the wine world were allowed to coexist, unedited, within the same frame? Not blended for effect, but aligned through trust.

The idea became a trial.

The trial became a wine.

And then, quietly, it became a continuum.

With the release of the 2022 vintage - following the inaugural 2021 and preceding already-bottled 2023 and 2024 - it is clear this is not an anomaly but a conversation with momentum. Like any meaningful dialogue, it gains clarity through repetition.

Just two old souls quietly finding they still have plenty to say to each other.

La Chapelle’s contribution comes from the Hill of Hermitage, a granitic rise that has produced some of the most consequential Syrah of the modern era. These wines are not defined by charm, but by authority earned over time. The 1961 remains a lodestar of 20th-century wine; vintages such as 1978, 1990, 1991 and 2015 continue to function as reference points rather than relics. Hermitage Syrah has never chased immediacy. It prefers gravity.

Grange, born in 1951 from a modest cottage at Magill Estate, brings a different but equally uncompromising lineage. Drawing from Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale and Coonawarra - including vines planted in the 19th century - Grange is not merely powerful; it is disciplined. Its great vintages endure not because they overwhelm, but because they resolve. Consistency, not excess, is its quiet triumph.

The 2022 growing season offered both houses something increasingly uncommon: conditions that encouraged restraint. In Hermitage, a dry winter and late budbreak gave way to accelerated growth under heat, followed by a brutal summer relieved only by a perfectly timed August rain - stress and reprieve in equal measure. In South Australia, the absence of extremes defined the year: mild summers, cool nights, orderly harvests. Barossa delivered depth without weight, McLaren Vale generosity without sprawl, Coonawarra line without austerity. These were intelligent seasons, not dramatic ones.

That intelligence is evident in the wine’s construction. Oak, often a signature marker for both houses, recedes into architecture rather than flavour. Grange’s new American oak and La Chapelle’s restrained French oak do not compete; they dissolve into a shared tannin framework that feels already settled, already absorbed. The wine does not feel “finished” so much as comfortable in its own skin.

In the glass, Grange La Chapelle 2022 resists interpretation before submission. Its colour is deep but not inert - a light-swallowing core edged by black-cherry translucence. Aromatically, it unfolds obliquely. There is an initial, fleeting lift - almost electrical - before depth takes hold: spent coffee grounds, pan jus, nutmeg, cola. Fruit does not declare itself; it emerges slowly, as resonance rather than sweetness - black cherry and ripe plum offset by blood orange and pomegranate, lending tension and pulse. Beneath it all lies a quiet mineral register: wet stone, ember ash, incense smoke - less descriptors than impressions. Florality appears late, abstracted, drawn from the inner mechanics of the flower rather than its surface.

The palate confirms what the nose only implies. Savoury first: smoked meats, venison, charcuterie, earth. Then lift - beetroot sweetness, red-cabbage snap, acidity that animates rather than sharpens. Texture is the wine’s defining language. Dense yet filigreed. Expansive yet contained. Tannins move as a continuum rather than a structure, carrying fruit and acidity with an ease that feels almost nonchalant. There is power here, unquestionably, but it is power without insistence - what might best be described as delicate density.

The finish does not resolve so much as recede. It lingers as an afterimage, a tactile memory rather than a flavour, inviting contemplation rather than applause.

Grange La Chapelle 2022 is not a wine designed to impress in the moment. It is calibrated for time - not as a concept, but as a collaborator. Twenty-five years feels conservative. Much longer feels inevitable.

This is not a trophy wine. It is a philosophical one. A meditation on origin, divergence, and return. Proof that when tradition is handled with humility - and curiosity - it can still surprise, still unsettle, still move forward.

One grape, remembering itself.

Two hemispheres, in dialogue.

A future already in motion.

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Words and photo by AW.