Inside the new Penfolds Collection, with winemaker Steph Dutton

Each year, Penfolds releases a suite of highly anticipated wines – headlined by Grange – and the 2026 collection is out now. While the winery is now celebrating 75 years of that flagship red, the broader release always proves there’s much more to Penfolds than its most celebrated wine. Grange will set you back $1000, but other wines in the collection start at $45, and there’s more choice than ever since the winery began sourcing fruit from other countries. Today, the Penfolds Collection includes wines from Australia as well as the US, France and China.

Penfolds Director of Winemaking Steph Dutton has seen the shifts across the range first-hand, having joined the winery as a Masters of Oenology student almost 20 years ago. Steph caught the wine bug working in Melbourne venues, and her first role with Penfolds was at the South Australian winery’s restaurant before joining the winemaking team. Today, she oversees the lot. “The biggest, most exciting evolution in my time has been the move into a global winemaking team where you have two vintages each year instead of one, so we’re learning more,” Steph says. “But we’ll always be anchored in Australia, or more specifically South Australia. That part doesn’t change – it’s still the beating heart.”

The first international Penfolds wines were made in California’s Napa Valley in 2018, which saw Steph based there for about six months. “Back and forth travel wasn’t enough to fully embed yourself properly to live it and breathe it, and get that first year up and running,” she says. Today, the wider team spends time on the ground in the respective regions at various points throughout the year. While the international additions may have been a surprise to some, they were a long time coming. “These wines were a 20-year ambition through slightly different lenses and forms to eventually give birth to that inaugural vintage out of 2018.” 

This year’s collection totals 24 wines, with four from the Napa Valley, one from France’s Bordeaux (a second will release soon), and one from China, which Steph says is a particularly exciting focus. “I’ve seen such big leaps and bounds in a short period of time in China, it’s been a dynamic evolution that’s happened at speed,” she says. The privilege of working in a celebrated region like Bordeaux never gets old, either. “The FWT [French Wine Trial] has little tweaks rather than the big step changes, but even being a part of a story with little tweaks in a region with such history feels monumental.”