By Jesse & Cassie · Last updated May 2026
I’ve been reading Jackie Chan’s autobiography — Never Grow Up — and there’s a wine-themed chapter buried in there that stayed with me. Specifically, about how a doctor’s appointment in the mid-1990s accidentally turned one of the biggest movie stars on the planet into Australia’s most consequential wine influencer, decades before “influencer” was a word anyone used.
I’d heard the broad strokes before — Jackie Chan likes Penfolds, there was a Lindemans tie-in, Australian wine took off in Asia. But the details are extraordinary, and after I read the chapter I wanted to know more. So I reached out to Treasury Wine Estates, Penfolds’ parent company, and asked them what they could share. They came back with confirmations I wasn’t expecting — including details that, to my knowledge, have never been published anywhere. They’re at the heart of this piece.
The short version: Jackie Chan has been a Penfolds collector for more than twenty years. According to Treasury Wine Estates, his Hong Kong cellar holds more than 1,000 bottles of Penfolds wine. He started not because anyone marketed to him, but because his doctor told him to drink red wine — and because the bottles had numbers on them.
This is how that happened.
A doctor’s prescription that changed Australian wine
In the mid-1990s, Chan went in for a routine check-up. His cholesterol was high. His physician’s number-one recommendation, according to his autobiography, was to swap his sweet white wine habit for dry red wine. Mediterranean-diet logic — the resveratrol-and-tannins argument that was everywhere in the 1990s, partly grounded in real science and partly carried along by the 60 Minutes “French Paradox” segment that had aired a few years earlier.
It is, on the face of it, mundane advice. Drink red wine instead of sweet white. Eat a little better. Move a little more. The kind of thing your doctor tells you and you mostly don’t act on.
Jackie Chan acted on it.
He didn’t do half measures, according to his own telling. He’d already developed a taste for Australian wine while filming Mr. Nice Guy in Melbourne a couple of years earlier — there’s a section in the book about being introduced to it on set — so when he set out to actually learn dry red, he started where his taste already pointed: Australia.
What happened next is one of the more accidentally consequential decisions in modern wine history.
The bottles with numbers on them
Chan writes that when he walked into wine shops in Australia and Hong Kong, the vocabulary defeated him. Cabernet, Shiraz, Mourvèdre, Grenache; left bank, right bank, Old Vine, Reserve; vintages, sub-appellations, sub-sub-appellations. He didn’t have the English wine vocabulary, and he didn’t have a frame of reference for any of it. So he gravitated toward the wines that gave him an anchor: Penfolds, because the bottles had numbers on them.
Bin 128. Bin 389. Bin 407. Bin 707.
He could walk into a shop and order by number. He could remember what he liked. He could work his way up. The numbers gave him a ladder.
If you’re outside Penfolds-world, that may sound trivial. It isn’t. The Penfolds Bin numbering system is one of the most underappreciated bits of wine branding in the world, and once you understand how it works, you see why a fluent-in-numbers person would gravitate to it.
What the Penfolds Bin numbers actually mean
Bin numbers — short for Batch Identification Numbers — were never originally a branding system. They were a piece of cellar housekeeping. In the early days of Penfolds at Magill Estate near Adelaide, individual lots of wine were stored in specific numbered storage bins inside the cellar. Bin 28 was wine sitting in bin number 28. Bin 128 was the wine in bin 128. The number on the label was, literally, an address.
Over the decades, those addresses became identities. The wine that was repeatedly produced from a particular blend or vineyard source got tagged with the same bin number year after year, and the bin number stopped meaning “where it’s stored” and started meaning “this style, made this way.” By the time Max Schubert was making the first vintages of what would become Grange in the early 1950s, the bin number system was already a shorthand. Grange itself was originally Bin 95.
Today the Penfolds hierarchy looks roughly like this:
- Bin 2 — Shiraz Mourvèdre. Lighter, fresher style.
- Bin 28 — Kalimna Shiraz. Warm-climate Barossa Shiraz, ripe and generous.
- Bin 128 — Coonawarra Shiraz. Cooler-climate counterpoint to Bin 28. Peppery, more savoury.
- Bin 389 — Cabernet Shiraz. The famous “Baby Grange” because it’s matured in the same barrels Grange just left.
- Bin 407 — Cabernet Sauvignon. Multi-regional Cabernet, the workhorse of the Bin range.
- Bin 707 — Cabernet Sauvignon (luxury). The Cabernet flagship — what Grange is to Shiraz.
- St Henri Shiraz. Old-school Penfolds Shiraz with minimal new oak. A historical counterweight to Grange’s American-oak style.
- RWT Bin 798 — Barossa Shiraz. Modern French-oak Shiraz, made specifically as a French-oak alternative to Grange’s American oak.
- Bin 95 — Grange. The Penfolds flagship. The most famous wine Australia has ever produced.
What’s elegant about this system, from a marketing perspective Penfolds didn’t intend, is that it works exactly like a ladder. Cheap bin at the bottom. Expensive bin at the top. Numbers in between. You don’t need to know what Coonawarra is, or why Shiraz tastes different from Cabernet, to understand that Bin 707 is more serious than Bin 407. The number tells you.
For a Hong Kong-based movie star navigating a new world in a new language, that ladder was an open invitation. And he climbed it. If you want a deeper read on the Australian regions where these wines come from, our McLaren Vale wine guide covers the neighbouring South Australian region in detail and our Margaret River wine guide does the same for the western side. More regions down under will be covered soon!
The wine shop, the markup, and the $120,000 afternoon
This is the part of the story that I love.
According to his autobiography, Chan started buying Penfolds at multiple wine shops around Australia and Hong Kong. The more he liked the wines, the more he bought. Every time he came back, the prices had crept up a little. He didn’t think much of it at first — wine is wine, prices go up — until he eventually figured out that the shops he was buying from were all owned by the same person. One savvy merchant had been quietly raising prices on Jackie Chan as his appetite grew, knowing exactly who his customer was and what his customer was willing to pay.
One of the biggest movie stars on the planet, getting marked up. It is a perfect little wine story.
It didn’t slow him down. According to multiple accounts, in 1999 a Canberra wine shop closed early so that Chan could shop privately. He walked out with more than A$167,000 of wine — roughly US$120,000 at exchange rates of the time. His haul reportedly included Penfolds Grange, Wolf Blass Black Label, and Henschke Hill of Grace. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the more storied single afternoons in modern wine retail.
Here’s where Treasury Wine Estates’ confirmation matters. In details shared exclusively with Wine Scribes, Treasury Wine Estates confirmed that Jackie Chan has been a collector of Penfolds wines for more than twenty years, “beginning with his wine ‘shopping sprees’ at Dan Murphy’s in Australia.” Dan Murphy’s is Australia’s biggest wine retailer; this is on the record from Penfolds’ parent company.
The book describes multiple smaller shops with a shared owner and escalating markups. The Treasury Wine Estates confirmation specifically names Dan Murphy’s. Those may be different shopping sprees on different trips. They’re not contradictory; they’re parallel.
Either way: a lot of bottles, a lot of money, over a long time.
The 1,000-bottle Hong Kong cellar (exclusive)
This is the section I want to highlight, because the details are remarkable, and to our knowledge they have never been published anywhere before.
In details shared exclusively with Wine Scribes, Treasury Wine Estates confirmed two things:
“Mr. Chan has more than one thousand bottles of Penfolds wines in his cellar in Hong Kong.”
“Over the years, Penfolds have serviced ‘more than a hundred bottles’ of Penfolds wines (mostly Grange, Bin 707 and other luxury wines) for Jackie at Re-corking Clinics in Hong Kong.”
Treasury Wine Estates, to Wine Scribes
Let’s sit with the first number. More than one thousand bottles of Penfolds alone. That doesn’t include anything else in the cellar — no Bordeaux, no Burgundy, no other Australian producers. A thousand bottles of one brand, sitting in Hong Kong, presumably across a vertical of vintages going back decades.
For context: that is a serious wine cellar by any measure. We’re not talking about a trophy case of 30 famous bottles, or a wine-fridge collection of weekend drinkers. A thousand bottles of a single producer, at Penfolds’ price points, is the kind of collection that probably has multiple full verticals of Grange. It’s a working library.
The second detail is what proves it. Penfolds runs a service called the Re-corking Clinic, and if you’re not familiar with it, this is worth a paragraph.
What is a Penfolds Re-corking Clinic?
It is one of the more unusual after-sale services in the wine world. Every few years, Penfolds sends senior winemakers to major markets — London, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Sydney, Shanghai — and offers a free inspection of any Penfolds bottle older than fifteen years. You bring your bottle. They check the fill level. They open the bottle, taste it to confirm it’s still sound, top it up with younger wine of the same style if needed, recork it, and certify the bottle as having been clinicked.
The point is preservation. Older corks fail. Fill levels drop. Wine evaporates. A bottle of 1990 Grange that was last seen at 750ml in 1992 might be at 720ml today, with a tired cork. The clinic resets the bottle’s clock.
It is, importantly, a service Penfolds offers because they want their flagship wines to keep aging gracefully in customer cellars for fifty years. It is also a service that costs Penfolds real money to run. They are not making it back at the door.
For Penfolds to have re-corked more than a hundred bottles for one collector is unusual. For those hundred-plus bottles to be mostly Grange and Bin 707 — the two most expensive everyday Penfolds wines — tells you something about the cellar.
This is the detail that confirms Jackie Chan is not a trophy collector. He’s a real one. He’s holding bottles long enough to need them serviced. He’s drinking them. He’s tracking which vintages need attention. Treasury Wine Estates has met him, in Hong Kong, with a hundred-plus of his own bottles in front of them, more than once.
That’s a collector.
How Southcorp signed him to Lindemans (not Penfolds)
Once you understand the size of the cellar, the next part of the story starts to make sense.
In 1998, Penfolds’ then-parent company Southcorp — what is now Treasury Wine Estates — signed Jackie Chan to a promotional deal. The detail people sometimes get wrong is which brand the deal was for.
It wasn’t Penfolds. It was Lindemans.
Lindemans was — and still is — the volume Australian wine brand sitting in the same parent-company stable as Penfolds. Penfolds is the prestige, low-volume, high-margin flagship. Lindemans is the multi-million-case grocery-store Shiraz. They serve different customers and play different roles.
Why sign the world’s biggest action star to the volume brand rather than the prestige one? Because Penfolds, at its luxury tiers, sells itself. The conversation Penfolds needed Jackie Chan to start wasn’t “what is Grange?” — wealthy Asian collectors already knew. The conversation Penfolds wanted to start with Chan was “Australian wine is a real category, and you can buy it at every price point.” That’s a Lindemans story, not a Grange story.
The deal produced a Jackie Chan Reserve Shiraz in the Lindemans portfolio, which was released in Asian markets through the late 1990s. It moved real volume. A Southcorp executive at the time called Chan the “quintessential role model” for new-world wine consumers in Asia, which is corporate-speak for this guy is doing more for our category than any campaign we could buy.
Restaurants in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Beijing, and across the region started stocking Australian wines because Jackie Chan drank Australian wines. Not Penfolds-tier Australian wines, necessarily — the Lindemans, Wolf Blass, Yalumba tier. The volume tier. The category-builder tier.
The endorsement happened. But — and this is the part that matters — the endorsement came after the collecting. Chan was buying serious Australian wine on his own dime for years before any deal was on the table. Southcorp signed an existing customer. They didn’t manufacture one.
The first wine influencer (and why “influencer” is the right word)
A famous person bought a lot of Australian wine, by his own choice, because his doctor told him to drink red and because the bottles he liked happened to have numbers on them. That famous person was photographed at restaurants ordering Australian wine. Other famous people noticed. Wealthy fans of those famous people noticed. Restaurants started carrying Australian wine to satisfy the demand. Australian wine exports to Asia went up. A parent company saw the data, signed the famous person to a promotional deal, and amplified what was already happening.
In 2026 language, we’d call that an organic-to-paid influencer arc. The famous person was the demand creator. The parent company was the demand harvester. That entire choreography — authentic enthusiasm, third-party validation, restaurant-stocking, brand deal — is the modern influencer playbook, twenty years before “influencer” had any working definition.
What’s striking is the contrast with how celebrity alcohol works today. The Pitt-Jolie Château Miraval rosé. Cameron Diaz’s Avaline. Post Malone’s Maison No. 9. John Legend’s LVE wines. George Clooney’s Casamigos tequila (which sold to Diageo for a billion dollars). The Rock’s Teremana. Ryan Reynolds and his Aviation gin (sold to Diageo for $610 million). These are real businesses, often with real founder involvement, and some of them are genuinely good products. But they are calculated. They are launched from a marketing brief. They are not consequences of one person’s curiosity in a wine shop.
Chan’s story is the reverse. The product existed. The producer existed. He found the producer. The deal came years later, after the relationship was real. The endorsement was almost a formality.
This is the part of the story we keep coming back to. Authenticity first. Endorsement second. That is not how celebrity alcohol normally works, and it is almost certainly why the Penfolds-Chan effect carried as far as it did.
The legacy: a $2.5B wine company and an entire region’s reputation
The cascade is genuinely hard to overstate.
In 1995, Australian wine was still a category Asia mostly didn’t know. By 2005, Australian wine was the fastest-growing import category in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Mainland China. Today, Treasury Wine Estates is a roughly US$2.5 billion publicly traded company, with Penfolds alone driving a substantial portion of its luxury revenue. Penfolds Grange auctions in Hong Kong routinely outperform Bordeaux first-growths of the same vintage. Asian collectors are, by some measures, the world’s most enthusiastic Penfolds market.
You cannot honestly draw a single line from Jackie Chan’s doctor’s appointment to Treasury Wine Estates’ market cap. There were dozens of other forces — China’s economic rise, Hong Kong’s role as the Asian wine hub, a generation of Australian winemakers doing the work to make wines worth drinking, savvy distribution. But the cultural opening — the moment when “Australian wine is something a serious person drinks” became a shared assumption in the most important Asian markets — that opening had a face on it. The face was Jackie Chan’s.
He didn’t set out to do any of this. He liked the bottles with numbers on them, and he didn’t stop.
Why this story stays with us
I’m writing this from a small wine project Cassie and I built called Wine Scribes. We make wine ourselves under our own label, Vespera Cellars, in the Columbia River Gorge and Portugal’s Douro Valley. We write about wine. We teach wine. We have, between us, exactly zero billion-dollar exits and zero blockbuster films.
But the reason this Jackie Chan story has lodged itself in our heads is that the structure of it is exactly what we’re trying to build a smaller version of with Wine Scribes. A place where genuine enthusiasm for underappreciated regions and small producers actually reaches the people who would love them. Where the recommendation comes first and the deal — if there’s ever a deal — comes a long way after.
Jackie Chan didn’t set out to change the Australian wine industry. He just really liked the wine with numbers on the bottle. We’re not trying to change the wine industry either. We just want to make sure the winemakers who deserve your attention actually get it.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to our newsletter here, take a practice wine knowledge test from our WSET hub, and follow along on Instagram. And if you want to start your own Jackie Chan-sized adventure in Penfolds — start with a Bin 28, work your way up the ladder, and don’t shop at the same store twice in a row.
If you want the source for this story, Jackie Chan’s autobiography is Never Grow Up (Amazon affiliate link). The wine chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
Frequently asked questions
According to Treasury Wine Estates, Chan has more than 1,000 bottles of Penfolds alone in his Hong Kong cellar. That number does not include any non-Penfolds wines.
Yes. According to his autobiography and multiple secondary sources, in 1999 Chan spent more than A$167,000 — approximately US$120,000 at the time — at a Canberra liquor store that closed early so he could shop privately. His haul reportedly included Penfolds Grange, Wolf Blass Black Label, and Henschke Hill of Grace.
Bin numbers are Batch Identification Numbers that originally referred to specific cellar storage locations at Penfolds’ Magill Estate. Over time the numbers came to identify distinct wine styles at different price and quality tiers — from Bin 2 and Bin 28 at the entry level, through Bin 389 (“Baby Grange”) and Bin 407, up to Bin 707 (premium Cabernet) and Bin 95, which is Grange itself.
Penfolds offers a free service where their senior winemakers inspect, top up, and recork any Penfolds bottle older than 15 years. The service runs in major wine markets including Hong Kong, London, New York, Sydney, and Singapore. According to Treasury Wine Estates, Jackie Chan has had more than 100 bottles serviced at clinics in Hong Kong — mostly Grange and Bin 707.
Yes. In 1998, Lindemans — owned by the same parent company as Penfolds (then Southcorp, now Treasury Wine Estates) — released a “Jackie Chan Reserve” Shiraz as part of a promotional partnership across Asia. It was a volume-tier wine, not a luxury release.
Chan is primarily known as a Penfolds collector, with a particular focus on Grange and Bin 707. His collection began in the mid-1990s with the more accessible Penfolds Bin wines — Bin 128, Bin 389, Bin 407 — before moving into the luxury tiers as his palate and budget grew.
Because Penfolds at its luxury tier was already self-marketing to wealthy collectors. The category Southcorp needed to build in Asia was <em>Australian wine as an everyday category</em> — a Lindemans story, not a Grange story. The Jackie Chan Reserve Shiraz on Lindemans was designed to move volume in Asian markets, not prestige.
About Jesse & Cassie
Jesse holds a Viticulture & Enology degree from UC Davis and has made wine in Burgundy, Yarra Valley, California, Washington and the Douro Valley. Cassie holds WSET Level 2 with Distinction and works in the vineyard and cellar alongside the writing. Together they co-founded Vespera Cellars, a small-batch wine label producing in the Columbia River Gorge and Portugal’s Douro Valley. They write at Wine Scribes, the #1 Google-ranked WSET education resource.
