PURPOSEFUL DAY DRINKING (WITH A PENFOLDS CLASSIC)

Talking with Joshua Yim, the luxury sales manager for Penfolds International, is like looking through a glass of full-bodied red in the light: you see depths there, deep tannins, and swirls of knowledge.

- By SCOTT GARCEAU

As he walks us through three glasses of the best-selling Penfolds 389 Cabernet Shiraz - starting with 2021, then back to 2002 and 1994-over a sumptuous feast at No.

8 China House in Grand Hyatt, BGC, you keep discovering things.

For instance, why the Penfolds 389 is so popular, and so collectible.

For that, Yim takes us back to the award-winning Penfolds Grange, created by Max Shubert in 1960, aged in American oak to combine the structure of cabernet sauvignon with the richness of shiraz. It was an iconic winner that held up for decades, fetching as much as $157,000 a bottle in 2021.

Now, the Penfolds 389 Cabernet Shiraz, often referred to as "Baby Grange" because components of the wine are matured in the same barrels that held the previous vintage of Grange, takes its place as a readily quaffable red with a judicious balance of fruit and oak that as we found during a lunch tasting-just gets better with age.

We enjoyed a Cantonese combination of roasted duck barbecued pork, jellyfish and air-dried beef with the 2021, which was a plucky pairing with the 2021 in our "vertical tasting" (as opposed to "horizontal," perhaps?).