The Art of a Longer Life: Penfolds, Troye Sivan and the Making of Things Worth Keeping.
Penfolds has spent generations persuading time to behave rather well in a bottle. Troye Sivan has built a creative world around the more elusive business of capturing a feeling before it disappears. Their collaboration brings these two preoccupations together, with rather more imagination than a celebrity name on a gift box might suggest.
A bottle of wine has an unusual relationship with the future. It is purchased in the present, often with an occasion in mind, then put somewhere dark and left to become a better version of itself. Or, depending on the owner's resolve, a considerably more expensive version of dinner.
Penfolds understands this arrangement better than most. Since Dr Christopher and Mary Penfold established their winery at Magill in 1844, the company has built its reputation on the patient accumulation of knowledge, the discipline of blending and a particular confidence in what time can do. Its wines have travelled well beyond the Adelaide foothills, but the idea at their centre remains remarkably consistent: a wine should possess an identity of its own, and the means to develop it.
The partnership with Troye Sivan introduces a different sensibility to that philosophy.
Musician, actor and creative director of lifestyle label Tsu Lange Yor, Sivan moves between sound, image, fragrance and interiors. His interests are less concerned with the monumental than with the intimate: The atmosphere of a room, the texture of an object, the photograph whose significance would be difficult to explain to anyone else.
It is an interesting meeting of minds. Penfolds has the institutional memory; Sivan has the personal archive. One works with vintages, the other with impressions. Their common ground is the curious human impulse to give certain experiences a life beyond the moment in which they occurred.
To understand why the collaboration has substance, it helps to return to Magill.
Mary Penfold is sometimes allotted less space in the winery's history than the men who followed her. She should not be. After Christopher's death in 1870, she assumed control of the business, overseeing its development through a period when women directing substantial commercial enterprises were hardly commonplace. By the time she retired in 1884, the foundations of a much larger operation were in place. Penfolds' history is not simply one of winemaking ingenuity; it is also a story of determined stewardship.
The next great act of imagination belonged to Max Schubert. Appointed chief winemaker in 1948, he set about making an Australian red capable of ageing for decades. His experiments produced the first Grange vintage in 1951. The project was initially rejected by the Penfolds board, and Schubert continued making the wine in secret before eventually winning approval to resume production. It is an excellent reminder that institutional heritage occasionally begins with somebody ignoring the institution.
Grange would become the defining expression of Penfolds' ambition, but Schubert was interested in something larger than a single celebrated wine. He envisaged a family of wines connected by a recognisable house style, each with its own character. The result was an approach in which consistency did not mean sameness, and innovation was not required to announce itself with a great deal of noise.
Bin 389 is one of the most compelling expressions of that thinking. First produced in 1960, it brings Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz together, marrying the former's structure with the latter's generosity. Its maturation in barrels previously used for Grange gave it the nickname 'Baby Grange', a rather affectionate description for a wine that has long since established its own reputation.
Its designation has a less glamorous but more interesting origin. At Magill, the wine was stored unlabelled in Bin 3, sections 8 and 9. The number survived the cellar arrangements that gave it birth. In an industry increasingly inclined to turn every detail into a story, there is something refreshing about a name that began as a practical instruction to cellar staff.
Sivan's intervention is to introduce a second history to the bottle.
The limited-edition 2023 Bin 389 is presented in a gift box, with the bottle wrapped in tissue printed with one of twenty photographs selected from his personal camera roll. The images are fragments rather than formal portraits of a career: Visual traces of people, places and experiences that have stayed with him. A separate magnum edition, limited to twenty examples, was conceived by Sivan and handcrafted by South Korean artist Rahee Yoon.
The camera roll is an especially revealing choice. It is perhaps the least curated archive of contemporary life, a sprawling inventory of things we photograph because, for reasons not always immediately apparent, we do not want to lose them. A half-remembered afternoon can sit beside a spectacular landscape, a friend's face beside an image taken for no purpose beyond the pleasure of looking.
The French writer Georges Perec devoted much of his work to the overlooked details of everyday existence. In Species of Spaces, he examined the ordinary environments through which life passes, suggesting that the apparently insignificant deserves closer attention. Sivan's photographs operate in a similar territory. They give the incidental a second life, asking the recipient to consider not simply what an image depicts, but why someone chose to keep it.
There is a pleasing exchange here. Penfolds supplies the wine, with its own carefully assembled history; Sivan contributes a more private one. The packaging becomes a meeting point between two kinds of provenance, one rooted in place and production, the other in experience.
The collaboration's more unexpected expression is Field Study: Magill, Penfolds' first candle fragrance, created with Tsu Lange Yor. It takes the partnership away from the familiar territory of wine presentation and into something considerably more sensory.
Sivan's visit to Magill Estate provided the inspiration. The fragrance draws on the character of the historic winery and its subterranean barrel rooms, with references to oak, fermenting grapes, vine stems and limestone. Rather than attempting to reproduce the scent of a glass of red - an undertaking that would probably be best left unattempted - it seeks to evoke the place in which the wine acquires its character.
This is where Sivan's interests become particularly relevant. Fragrance occupies an unusual position in the hierarchy of memory. A sound or image may remind us of something; a scent can seem to return us there before we have had time to think. It bypasses much of the conscious business of recollection.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard explored the emotional geography of domestic spaces in The Poetics of Space. His interest was in the private worlds contained within houses, i.e. the associations attached to rooms, the imaginative life of corners, the peculiar significance of places that might appear unremarkable to an outsider. Magill, translated into fragrance, becomes something of this kind. It is no longer simply a destination in South Australia, but an atmosphere that can be encountered elsewhere.
The making of the candle is as considered as its inspiration. The 500g ceramic vessel and lid are handcrafted in Melbourne by RL FOOTE, a creative partner of Tsu Lange Yor. Clay is shaped, trimmed, stamped, fired and glazed; the wax is locally mixed and poured by specialist makers. A 210g glass format accompanies the larger ceramic edition, which has an approximate burn time of sixty hours.
The ceramic form takes its cue from vintage wine bottles dating to the eighteenth century. Once the candle has finished its work, the vessel is intended to remain, repurposed as an object in its own right. This is a rather more convincing afterlife for packaging than the usual promise that one might keep the box.
The holiday collection extends the idea into the rituals of giving. Holiday Designed by Troye Sivan, released in October 2026, brings his design language to a selection of Penfolds wines, including Bin 389, Bin 407, FWT 585, FWT 543 and St Henri. The gift boxes draw on the familiar pleasures of handwritten notes, folded paper, colour and texture, with individual messages selected by Sivan.
It would be easy to dismiss such details as decorative. That would miss the point. The experience of receiving something begins well before the contents are revealed. There is anticipation in the weight of a parcel, the quality of its wrapping, the small pause before the paper gives way. Sivan has made these gestures part of the design rather than treating them as an afterthought.
His approach also sits neatly alongside the philosophy of Tsu Lange Yor. The brand's name, a Yiddish expression meaning 'to long years', carries a sentiment that might have been devised for a winery. Its emphasis on fragrance, domestic objects and considered design gives Sivan a vocabulary beyond the visual spectacle of pop culture. He understands that the things with which we surround ourselves can become part of our personal history, often without our noticing.
There is an irony in this collaboration that we rather like.
Penfolds makes wine for people who are willing to wait. Sivan works in a culture that has made waiting seem almost unreasonable. Yet his design practice repeatedly returns to the physical, the tactile and the enduring. The phone may be where the photographs begin, but the ambition is to take them somewhere beyond the screen.
Perhaps the most useful way to understand the partnership is through the Japanese idea of mono no aware: An awareness of the transience of things, accompanied by an appreciation of their passing. It is not quite nostalgia, nor an attempt to arrest time. It is the recognition that an experience can be more valuable precisely because it cannot be repeated.
That thought has a particular resonance for wine.
A vintage is inseparable from the conditions that produced it. No amount of technical consistency can make one year identical to another. The winemaker's task is to understand what the season has offered and give it the best possible expression. The resulting bottle becomes a record of a moment in nature, shaped by human judgement and eventually interpreted by whoever opens it.
Sivan approaches the same impermanence through different materials. A photograph, a fragrance, a handwritten message or a room encountered at the right moment: Each is a way of giving an experience some form of continuity. None can preserve the original moment intact. Nor, arguably, should they.
Penfolds brings to the partnership a history that does not need embellishment. Sivan brings a sensibility that finds significance in the things a conventional brand narrative might overlook. The collaboration works when these instincts are allowed to coexist, rather than when one is made to imitate the other.
The candle will burn down. The tissue will be unfolded. The bottle, if all goes according to plan, will be opened. What remains may be a photograph, a vessel on a shelf, or the memory of a particular evening and the people who happened to be there.
For a house whose greatest wines are often bought with the intention of keeping them, there is a quietly useful reminder in all this. The point of making something last is not necessarily to keep it untouched. Eventually, even the most carefully cellared bottle has to meet the glass.
And Penfolds, one suspects, would prefer it that way.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Penfolds.
