Penfolds Superblend 2022: One Wine, Two Interpretations - Inside 802.A vs 802.B.
- May 9
- 4 min read
There is a quiet provocation embedded in the premise: that a wine might begin as one thing and, without dilution or compromise, arrive as two. Not a blend in the conventional sense - where multiplicity resolves into harmony - but a bifurcation, deliberate and sustained. It feels less like winemaking than metaphysics.
With the 2022 Superblend 802.A and 802.B, Penfolds has produced something that resists the usual vocabulary of release cycles and line extensions. These are not iterations so much as arguments - about origin, about process, about whether identity is something inherent or something constructed over time.
The raw material is, by any measure, rarefied: parcels of Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon drawn from Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Padthaway and Coonawarra, fruit of the kind typically reserved for the gravitational pull of Grange and Bin 707. There is already a sense of displacement here, a subtle undoing of expectation. What was destined for singularity is instead redirected into plurality.
From that shared origin, the wines diverge - not dramatically, but decisively, in ways that feel almost philosophical in their precision. In 802.A, Shiraz and Cabernet are kept apart through maturation, each raised in new American oak before being brought together. Time, in this instance, is experienced separately, almost privately, before synthesis. The result carries a certain amplitude: blackberry and cassis unfolding into marzipan and vanilla, tannins that feel worked but not overdetermined, a breadth that suggests accumulation rather than restraint. There is something old-world in its confidence, not stylistically so much as structurally - a willingness to occupy space.
802.B takes the opposing route. Here, the varieties are combined immediately after vintage, coexisting from the outset, their identities shaped in relation rather than in isolation. Eighteen months in predominantly French oak follows, and the effect is markedly different. The wine moves with a kind of tensile clarity - blackcurrant and chinotto, olive, graphite - its structure less expansive than precise. Where 802.A seems to gather, 802.B edits. It is linear, composed, almost architectural in the way it holds itself.
To taste them side by side is to encounter a question posed in liquid form: does sequence matter? Does the order in which elements come together alter not just expression, but essence?
It is tempting to reach for analogy. Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinths come to mind - those branching structures in which each path is equally real, equally valid, yet irreconcilable. Or Heraclitus, for whom flux was the only constant: the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice. Superblend complicates even that. Here, the river is split deliberately, its course engineered into parallel streams, each observed not for superiority but for difference.
If Penfolds has always been defined by its “House Style,” that phrase reveals its elasticity here. This is a house built not on terroir alone, but on method - on the belief that the act of blending, across regions and parcels, can produce something more coherent than any singular origin. Superblend feels like a distillation of that ethos, pushed to its conceptual edge. Not just what is blended, but when, and how, and in what sequence.
There is also the matter of time, which hangs over these wines with unusual weight. They are not intended for immediacy. The drinking windows stretch decades ahead - into the 2030s, the 2040s, beyond. They exist, at least in part, in the future tense.
That sense of projection was palpable last October in Sydney, when Peter Gago led a recorking clinic that felt equal parts ritual and reckoning. Bottles from previous decades were opened, assessed, re-corked - time made tangible in glass. Amidst those older wines, the inaugural 2018 Superblends were poured.
It was a curious juxtaposition: wines already deep into their own histories alongside those barely at the beginning of theirs. And yet, the Superblends did not feel out of place. If anything, they seemed preoccupied with that very continuum - aware, somehow, of the temporal arc they were entering. They did not announce themselves so much as position themselves, quietly, within a lineage.
What lingered was not simply their quality, though that was evident, but their intent. These were wines that seemed to have been thought through - conceptually as much as technically. There was a deliberateness to them, a sense that each decision had been made not just for flavour or structure, but for what it might reveal.
The 2022 release extends that line of thinking. Notably, it appears in isolation - no 2019, 2020 or 2021 counterparts. This is not a series in the conventional sense, but an episodic inquiry, contingent on conditions that justify its existence. It arrives when it needs to, not when it is expected to.
Perhaps that is what makes Superblend feel quietly radical. In a landscape that increasingly prizes singular narratives - single vineyard, single origin, single expression - it proposes something more plural. Not excess, but multiplicity. Not resolution, but divergence held in tension.
There is a passage in In Search of Lost Time where memory is described as something that does not simply retrieve the past, but reshapes it with each act of recall. Superblend operates in a similar register. It is not fixed. It is contingent, evolving - not just over decades in bottle, but in the very way it has been conceived.
One wine, split into two. Not to determine which is better, but to understand what changes when a single idea is allowed to unfold along different paths.
It is, ultimately, less about comparison than about possibility.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Penfolds.
