Steph Dutton has been to Singapore several times, but she never gets tired of the sky-high views. On her last trip, 67 Pall Mall dazzled with a panorama of Orchard Road; this time, she has a bird’s-eye ocean view of Marina Bay South from High House. Dutton is in town to present a very special release: the new Bin 180 Coonawarra Cabernet Shiraz 2021, created to celebrate Penfolds’s 180th year.
Alongside the usual 750ml and magnum formats, the brand created just eight units of the Bin 180 in the rare jeroboam (3-litre) size, enclosed in a limited-edition art piece by South Australian artisan Andrew Bartlett. The fluid design utilises Penfolds French oak barrels, representing 18 decades of brand history. “This wine is one of those that just lands on your doorstep,” Dutton explains.
“In 2021, it was a great vintage for Coonawara. Our heritage Block 10 Cabernet Sauvignon and Block 5 Shiraz did equally well. We thought, what if we put the two pieces together? We realised that they always meant to belong together—the result was elegant, graceful and incredibly proportionate.
The Bin 180 is a reminder of our past, while there’s a lot of modernity that reminds us where we are going.” Journey of the winemaker Dutton has spent 17 years with Penfolds, 14 of those as a winemaker. She is a Melbourne girl at heart, having grown up with the diversity of living in a big city.
It was while pursuing a Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne that her interest was pique.