In the wine industry the lead-time from vision to realisation can be twenty years. It takes that long for vines and winemaking skills to mature. Indeed, in some cases, it may be even longer before consumers perceive the benefit of a visionary decision made decades earlier.

For example, when Karl Seppelt established vineyards at Drumborg, first landfall north of the Antarctic in Victoria’s cold Portland region, and at Keppoch (now called Padthaway) in 1964, he was twenty years ahead of the market. In Drumborg’s case, the lag was probably more like forty years, as we are only now seeing the best of that remarkable vineyard.

And so it is with viognier, the Rhone Valley’s most highly regarded white variety, now attracting serious intention in France, Australia and California – an interest that appears to have stirred in all three countries about twenty years ago.

Yet production figures tell us that, in Australia at least, viognier occupies a small but well publicised niche.

According to the Winemakers Federation of Australia, our vignerons crushed about 400 tonnes of viognier in 2000, 700 in 2001, 1300 in 2002 and 1910 in 2003. With a reported 540 hectares in the ground, we can expect future annual production in the vicinity of 5000 tonnes (350 thousand dozen bottles) a year – small change compared to riesling’s 30 thousand tonnes (2.1 million dozen) or chardonnay’s 250 thousand tonnes (17.5 million dozen).

I quote these figures not to deny the importance of viognier, but to underline the fact that wine consumption is not nearly as prone to fashion swings as is sometimes suggested. Almost invariably wine ‘fads’ are more about winemakers and adventurous drinkers gradually expanding the sensory palette available to all of us rather than introducing any popular shift in taste.

In viognier’s case, that sensory experience can be sensational, offering a unique spectrum of aromas and luscious flavours and a silky, viscous texture. However viognier’s charms are not easily captured

Australia’s interest in viognier seems to have begun in the late seventies. According to a Yalumba paper, Heathcote winery in central Victoria probably trialled the variety prior to Yalumba’s acquisition of cuttings from Montpellier, France in 1979. Yalumba propagated these cuttings and planted 1.2 hectares on the Vaughan vineyard, Eden Valley, in 1980, claiming this as the first commercial viognier planting in Australia.

Viognier seems to have made its way to France from Bosnia in about 280 AD. Once widely cultivated, it fell from favour, the total area planted falling to 29 hectares by 1958 before its renaissance in the 1980s.

Although widely planted in Provence and the vast Languedoc-Roussillon region in the south, viognier’s most profound expression is found in the sumptuous whites of Condrieu and Chateau Grillet in the northern Rhone Valley. It also plays an important supporting role to shiraz in many of the reds of neighbouring Cote-Rotie.

These wonderful whites and reds serve as inspiration to new-world winemakers. Like most global benchmarks, the best Rhone wines cost a packet but they do find their way into Australia and have done for twenty years. The best known and distributed, and also amongst the very best are those of Marcel Guigal.

To taste Guigal’s Condrieu (100 per cent viognier) or Chateau d’Ampuis Cote-Rotie is a fast track to enlightenment. (The wines are imported by Negociants Australia, the import distribution arm of Yalumba).

However, Australia has made great progress with viognier – both as a straight varietal white and in tandem with shiraz. A benchmark of the dry white style is Yalumba’s ‘The Virgilius’ made from those old vines in the Vaughan vineyard. It retails for $80, when you can find it. Or for around $60 you can savour the superb – and even scarcer – Clonakilla Canberra District Viognier.

But there are many more affordable versions available of which Yalumba Eden Valley, Stonehaven Limestone Coast, Meeting Place, Ravensworth and Kingston Estate Empiric provide interesting variations on the variety’s sumptuous apricot-like flavours.

The cutting-edge versions, though, seem to moving towards a subtler, complex style as makers come to grips with the variety. I’ll report back shortly after a planned tasting of the cream of Australia’s viognier crop.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

In the eighties and nineties, New Zealand, led by the Marlborough region, carved a global niche for itself with sauvignon blanc. This century it’s set, I believe, to create a similar niche for pinot noir, the difficult-to-make but seductive red originating in France’s Burgundy region.

Already it’s New Zealand’s number one red variety in tonnes produced, ranking third behind the popular whites sauvignon blanc and chardonnay.

At present the hot money as to where New Zealand’s finest pinots might come from probably sits on Martinborough (north east of Wellington) and Central Otago, near Queenstown.

But a number of other areas, including Nelson, to the west of Marlborough on the north coast of the South Island, and Waipara, to the north of Christchurch, are also in the running.

Judged by international column centimetres devoted to New Zealand pinot noir, Central Otago ought to be favourite. But it’s early days in this amazingly diverse and viticulturally risky region.

Marlborough, typecast as a sauvignon blanc producer, doesn’t always rate a mention in pinot noir commentary. Yet it’s a major producer of the variety and it’s not all destined for sparkling wine production.

Marlborough’s big push into pinot began in the mid nineties as Montana, New Zealand’s largest wine producer (subsequently acquired by Pernod Ricard), established broad acres specifically for red table wine production.

From growing broad acres to making top pinot noir is a huge step, requiring great attention to detail in vineyard and winery. Even so, by 2003, Montana and its subsidiary Stoneleigh were producing attractive varietal pinots at several quality and price levels.

The last time I visited Montana, in winter 2003, the winemakers believed that the skills they were learning on a small scale could be scaled up to make large volumes of attractive pinot at a modest price. Wines tasted subsequently tend to support this confidence.

However, every region needs its flagship wines – products seen as benchmarks of a style, much as Ata Rangi and Martinborough Vineyards have done for Martinborough and Felton Road has done for Central Otago pinot noir.

While a couple of Marlborough producers – like Fromm – have gone close to that distinction, I believe that Wither Hills, part of the winemaking arm of brewer Lion Nathan, is about to get there.
And while production of Wither Hills Pinot Noir is not massive, it’s sufficient to take advantage of Lion

Nathan’s large distribution network. In other words, unlike the superb product of those boutique makers, at least you and I have some chance of finding Wither Hills pinot in a retail store.

Whatever, the volume available, Brent Marris’s achievement in making pinot of this quality is formidable. It’s been a long-term goal of his in a lifetime of growing grapes and making wine in Marlborough.

Today Brent tends extensive vineyards containing several pinot noir clones planted at a variety of sites along the base of the Wither Hills. He processes these in a winery purpose built to handle numerous small batches – each fermented and matured separately prior to final blending.

The resulting bright, fresh, complex wines give infinitely more drinking pleasure than the dirty, dull, expensive or just mediocre wine that too often poses as Burgundy.

The Burgundians still make the best pinot noirs. But unless they can lift the standard of average Burgundy, then New Zealand is going to have a field day. And Marlborough could be leading the pack.

Wither Hills Marlborough Pinot Noir 2004 $45-$50
At least one corner of Marlborough produces wine of a quality to challenge Martinborough and Central Otago in New Zealand’s pinot noir ratings.  On the cooler, southern side of the Wairau Valley, Wither Hills — run for Lion Nathan by long-time Marlborough vigneron Brent Marris – makes what I believe are some of the best commercial pinots in the world. It didn’t happen overnight. But with maturing vines, a diversity of clones, multiple sites and a purpose built winery, Brent now makes bright, pure, beautifully fragrant and intense pinot like this stunning 2004. I’ve yet to taste the $50 French Burgundy that could hold a light to it.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2006 & 2007

Real Champagne, from the region of that name in northern France, provides the model for Australia’s rapidly evolving premium sparkling wines. It’s a century since we first copied Champagne-making techniques. But it’s only in the last few decades that we got to the heart of the matter in seeking the right grapes.

In the first wave, starting in the late seventies, leading wine makers began to move away from second-string varieties like ondenc and chenin blanc and towards two of the three classic varieties, chardonnay and pinot noir. But resources were small and generally from warmer areas with grapes more suited to table wine than sparkling-wine production.

The second wave saw grapes planted specifically for sparkling wine production. These plantings, in the far south or at high altitude, produce the far better bubblies that emerged in the eighties and nineties. Wines like Croser, Seppelt Salinger, Chandon, Deutz Marlborough Cuvee, Jansz vintage, Hanging Rock, the Hardy range, notably its flagship, Arras, made by Ed Carr and Taltarni’s Tasmanian Clover Hill are products of a continuing southward and upward vineyard expansion. (In a third wave of evolution we may well see a day when most of our best bubblies come mainly from Tasmania –already the primary source of Hardy’s Arras — and New Zealand’s south island.)

What we’ve witness in Australasia is the reverse of what happened in Champagne. There a marginal climate forced the evolution of sparkling wine; here our search for flavour and delicacy in sparkling wines leads inexorably to cooler grape-growing conditions.

Champagne’s major city, Reims, lies at latitude 49°18’ north. That’s marginal grape-growing territory indeed. Nevertheless, it’s the centre of an industry with around 30,000 hectares of vines dedicated to sparkling wine production.

But for most of its winemaking history Champagne made still wines. The harsh climate, however, ensured great inconsistency of quality from year to year, especially in reds. These tended to be thin, pale, and insipid in off vintages. With too little heat and sunshine, grapes tended to be high in acid and low in colour and sugar.

As well, cold autumn days often knocked out the yeast cells before fermentation ended. With spring and warm weather, yeasts sprung back to life converting the remaining sugar in wine barrels to alcohol and carbon dioxide. This natural tendency for wines to effervesce in spring was nature’s accident just waiting for humans to harness. And when they did, Champagne was born.

Total control of the process took a few centuries, perfected only after Pasteur unlocked the mysterious relationship between yeast and sugar, and bottle manufacturers made glass strong enough to resist five atmospheres of pressure.

Rendering Champagne sparkling rid the region of its insipid red wines, too. Since all the colour in a red grape is in the skin, the area’s makers learned to make white wine by removing juice from contact with the skins of the red varieties, pinot noir and pinot meunier, as quickly as possible.

Today, two thirds of the grapes making clear Champagne are red. Had the evolution from still to sparkling wine meant nothing more than changing from one insipid wine to another, there’d be no vines left in the district today. Instead, the Champagne method unlocked exquisite flavours inherent to these cold-grown grapes.

Now, the chemistry of grape ripening is complex but, in brief, grapes struggling to ripen at this latitude achieve ripe flavours with high acid and low sugar levels. Grapes harvested at an alcohol potential of only 10 per cent make quite intensely flavoured (if a little tart) wine in the Champagne region.

In Australia, 1970’s bubbly makers, notably Seaview’s Norm Walker, pioneering with pinot noir and chardonnay tended to harvest grapes from comparatively warm areas — like Coonawarra and Padthaway — at similar sugar levels to those found in Champagne grapes. While high in acid, the grapes had little flavour and made harsh, green wines.

And when the grapes were allowed to ripen more, they tended to produce fat and flabby sparkling wines without the intensity or delicacy of Champagne. Some of these were terrific big wines, laden with rich fruit flavours. But makers seeking flavour with delicacy knew they had to find grapes more in the Champagne mould.

Today, the evolution is well advanced. Mid-priced bubblies like Hardys Sir James and Jacobs Creek Reserve Brut offer phenomenal value to consumers. And, of course, the our top shelf wines like Hardys Arras and Hanging Rock offer a serious alternative to some of the French originals.

But even the best of our bubblies, in my opinion, can’t yet match the delicacy, finesse and intensity of the best Champagnes, sourced from the finest vineyards. That we don’t yet have a Dom Perignon, or Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame, though, is hardly surprising.

The French had many centuries to develop sparkling Champagne and another two to perfect the winemaking art and identify the greatest vineyard sites – now formally classified. Science, plus intelligence of the French experience, allowed our vignerons to fast track much of the winemaking.

But even with the best science, finding the most suitable vineyard sites remains largely a matter of trial and error within well-defined climatic parameters. All else being equal, this is the key to quality and future improvement, albeit incrementally from now on.

From a competitive point of view that’s not a bad position to be in. The French have probably already made their best bubblies. But ours are yet to emerge.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

Well known Barossa winemaker Grant Burge passed through Canberra this week, promoting Meshach, his flagship red, and commenting on the most extraordinary vintage in living memory.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, he said. ‘Reds are down in volume by seventy per cent and whites by thirty five per cent. It’s the vintage from hell’.

Burge believes that Australia’s vintage could be as low as 1.1 million tonnes, well down on industry mid-vintage estimates of around 1.3 million tonnes. He believes this is because initial reports extrapolated on yields from hot, earlier ripening regions that were not as hard hit by frost and drought as cooler, later ripening areas.

Burge believes that the sudden shortage will drive prices up and has already affected vigneron behaviour. Normally by this stage of vintage larger makers would have begun to sell off bulk wine not required for brand commitments.

But in 2007, he says, this is not happening, meaning virtually no current-vintage bulk-wine market. Everyone is hanging on to everything they have and many makers are desperately short of some varieties.

It seems that 2007 will be a year of great financial pain for many growers and winemakers. The abrupt change from surplus to shortage hits in different ways. Growers – some of whom may also be winemakers – are faced with all the costs of a normal season but little income to offset the costs.

And winemakers — whether self-reliant in grapes, partially reliant or totally dependent on contract fruit – face the dilemma of under utilised equipment and a big gap in stock for the years ahead.

Burge, for example, says that his Illapara winery, in the main street of Tanunda, Barossa Valley, processed 4.5 thousand tonnes last year but will see only two thousand tonnes in 2007. He believes that some larger producers have been even harder hit with some wineries reportedly falling tens of thousands of tonnes short of capacity.

After three vintages at around two million tonnes, the sudden wrenching shift from top to second gear, at 1.1 million tonnes, will jolt the industry and flow on to drinkers through firmer pricing.

Reportedly, surplus bulk wine from previous vintages is being dispersed rapidly. And because it is not being replaced, pressure on supplies and, hence, prices, will probably be fairly quick in some sectors of the market.

If there’s a serious shortage at the cheap end of the market, it’s quite likely that producers and large retailers will do as they have in the past and turn to imports to make up the shortfall.

For a middle-sized premium producer like Burge, though, that’s not an option. Grant says that the large vintages of 2005 and 2006 provide something of a buffer. Good stocks of reds from those vintages can be managed to at least partly offset the losses of 2007, and white volumes are down but not disastrously so.

And what’s quality like in the Barossa in 2007? Again, Burge says he’s never seen anything like it. Red grapes, hard as bullets, seem to be all skin and no flesh. What this means is inky black wines (colour pigments are all in the skins) packed with tannins. They’re not attractive at present, says Burge, and he doesn’t know whether they’ll soften with time or stay as they are.

Perhaps that’s good reason for us to stock up, at historically low prices, on the excellent 2004, 2005 and 2006 vintages now in the market.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

It’s been a field day for wine drinkers. But Australia’s benchmark red-wine brand, I believe, has never seen such grim times. Caught in a three-way pincer of wine glut, fierce retail competition and a parent company seemingly desperate for sales, Penfolds annual ‘Bin’ wine release hit new lows in 2007.

Retail prices slumped to unprecedented levels for the range as a whole. And what appears to me as indecisive marketing under successive ownerships sent a confusing message on the relative merits of cork and screw cap seals.

Penfolds winemakers favoured screw caps from early in the decade following a successful maturation trial with the 1996 Bin 389. But a piecemeal rollout means that of the current releases, Bin 138 Barossa Grenache Shiraz Mourvedre 2005, Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz 2005, Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz 2004 and Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 have screw caps and Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz 2004 and Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz 2004 have corks.

From a consumer perspective, in the short term anyway, things couldn’t be better. With Penfolds reds at fire-sale prices why not fill the boot and drive home with a smile on your face?

But why are the Penfolds prices at their lowest in a decade? Competition and glut play a role. But the malaise in parent company Fosters wine division is probably the key. With a reported ten per cent slide in wine sales in the first half of 2006-07, it’s quite plausible that Fosters are using the annual Penfolds release to bring sales home in the second half, though they tell me that that’s not the case.

It’s the ideal fire-sale brand as retailers invariably offer Penfolds at or near cost on release. And it’s the most significant wine release of the year because of the large volumes and big dollars involved.

But it’s also one in which retailers don’t want to be caught out. In release week in early March, The Canberra Times carried three press ads for the new Penfolds reds in one edition: Woolworths-owned Dan Murphy announced the release without posting prices, adding that it wouldn’t be undercut. Coles-Group-owned Vintage Cellars stuck its head above the trenches offering Bins 128, 138 and 28 at around $22 – only to have it lopped off by 1st Choice (another Coles Group brand) at around $18.

The following week, Dan Murphy cut the price to less than $16 – territory that hadn’t been approached, as far as I can recall, since the 1990s. Then last weekend, Sydney-based independent Kemeny’s chopped again — to $15.80.

What that meant, given Coles and Woolies ‘we-won’t-be-undercut’ pledge, was a new market-wide price that was more than $2 a bottle below last year’s floor.

Confusingly, Fosters have released two vintages of Bin 128 Coonawarra Shiraz – 2004 and 2005. The rationale for doing this, says the press release, is that ‘The Penfolds winemaking team believe the style of the Bin 128 is enhanced by an earlier release’. But that’s at odds with winemaker Peter Gago’s tasting note: ‘this wine needs time” – a view confirmed by my own tasting.

The confusing messages emerging from the current Penfolds release – why am I worth less this year than last? Am I to be cork or screw cap sealed? At what age should I be released? – could not come at a worse time for Australia’s wine industry.

With the price per litre of exported wine in serious decline, we need to build premium brands, not degrade the ones we have.

Whether justified or not, confusing messages, even little ones, about brands creates doubts about quality. And that’s something Australia’s wine industry cannot afford with an icon like Penfolds.

We can only hope that Fosters comes to grips with its wine portfolio. On a brighter note, the new Penfolds releases – Bins 28, 128, 138, 389 and 407 – do stack up on quality. You can read my reviews of the range on this website.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

Grape production figures for Victoria’s King Valley (stretching thirty kilometres northwards up the King River roughly from Milawa at 170 metres above sea level to the Whitlands plateau at 800 metres) reveal the tiny scale of some the most interesting wines in the valley – tiny plots of Italian varieties like sangiovese, nebbiolo and arneis.

In the King Valley, as in virtually every region in Australia, some, or all of, shiraz, cabernet, merlot, pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling, sauvignon blanc and semillon contribute the majority of output.

But because everyone, everywhere grows these varieties, we might be excused for not hanging a King Valley sign on any one of them – as we do, say, for Hunter semillon, Clare riesling or Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon.

No, the King Valley’s shingle, to date, hangs on Italian red and white varieties even if these make up only a small portion of an annual fifteen thousand tonne grape crush.

Although Brown Bros pioneered some Italian styles in its ‘kindergarten’ winery — designed for small, experimental wine batches — Mornington based Gary Crittenden took Italian diversity and quality to another level before local Italian-descended small growers made the transition from grape-growing to winemaking.

During a downturn when Brown Bros reduced its grape intake, cousins Fred and Arnie Pizzini and another grower, Guy Darling, established King Valley Wines at Whitfield. Fred says they built the winery because, “We all wanted a winery, but thought, why build three? We didn’t want our grapes going to distant places. And we wanted to maintain the premium image of wines, mostly whites at the time, coming out of the area”.

The switch from contract grape growing to winemaking gathered pace in the nineties. Certainly by the time I passed through with visiting Italian winemaker, Dino Illuminati, in 1997, Italian-descended farmers-turned-vignerons were setting the Valley’s wine and food direction.

The Italian flavour grew over time and was the real point of interest when the Valley’s makers visited Canberra recently. Sure, they offered shiraz and cabernet, chardonnay etc. But who cares? You can taste these varieties anywhere.

The excitement, to this palate anyway, lay in the Italian varieties — pinot grigio (ok, it’s French but it’s the Italian name and made in the Italian style), moscato, dolcetto, sangiovese, nebbiolo, verduzzo, arneis, barbera, marzemino and prosecco – and to a lesser extent the Russian saperavi and petit manseng from Jurancon, southern France.

These varieties provide a novel flavour spectrum: from the delicate, grapey, sweet freshness of Brown Brothers Moscato – at around five per cent alcohol — to the sappy, dry, pleasantly tart Dal Zotto sparkling Prosecco; to the bracing Chrismont La Zona Arneis or slurpy, sweet, red Marzemino Frizzante; to Pizzini’s dazzling verduzzo and profound, tannic Coronomento Nebbiolo; to the savoury dryness of several sangioveses and summer-berry freshness of the red barbera.

Many of these can be found in good liquor stores. But the individual wineries and the region can be easily Googled for more information or online ordering. Even better, with the King Valley just four hours’ drive from Canberra, a long weekend is all it takes to explore the wines on site and to taste them with local Italian food.

I wonder, too, if the King Valley folk might complete the Italian theme and produce varietal grappa – an obligatory touch in any Italian wine-growing region.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

A few years back, says Ross Brown of Brown Brothers, the Winemakers Federation of Australia discovered something startling: sixty per cent of Aussie wine drinkers enjoy a glass only infrequently. Asked why they didn’t drink more wine, the occasional sippers said they didn’t like the flavour. Shock! Horror!

The revelation floored the WFA. Why, they wondered, was the industry talking to just forty per-cent of drinkers? How could so many people not like the flavour of wine? But the finding didn’t surprise Ross.

Why would you be surprised, he asked last week in Canberra? Wine, he said, is so unlike the sweeter things that we drink all the time – everything from mother’s milk to fruit juice to soft drink and even beer – it’s little wonder that many people don’t like it.

Conditioned by decades of testing — via Australia’s biggest cellar door operation – Brown Brothers had long since cracked the taste code of the WFA’s reluctant sixty per-cent.

Located on the Oxley Plains, at the northern entry to the King Valley, near Victoria’s ski fields, Brown Bros hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. They literally flow from buses, cars and bicycles into a series of easy-access, spacious tasting bays.

For decades Browns have used the cellar door to test new wines, learn what people like and then give it to them. This approach treats both the wine savvy and the insecure equally seriously.

While cellar door sales constitute only a small fraction of output, says Ross, it provides continuing, direct feedback on what people like. And this, in turn, drives strategic decisions on grape plantings and wine production for the market at large.

This approach encourages a stream of new products that can be made in small volume in the ‘kindergarten’ winery, tested at cellar door, and then rolled out in volume if successful.

Successful rollouts can mean anything from cool-grown, bone-dry pinot gris for enthusiastic wine drinkers to innovative sweet styles for the unconvinced. And whatever the new style is, ramped-up production means big investments in vineyards and considerable lead times.

Ross says that consistently over the years sweet, fruity table wines – in a range of styles — have been the winners and remain the biggest selling styles at cellar door.

The current cellar door favourites, for example, are the red Cienna and white Moscato – both sweet wines weighing in at a modest 5.5 and 5 per cent alcohol respectively.

Cienna is a new variety which, like Brown Brothers successful Tarango, was bred by the CSIRO. And the Moscato, a delightful frizzante style, is modelled on the fruity, crisp, low-alcohol styles of Asti, Italy.

These are seriously good, innovative wines that join a long line of other sweeties, including the red Dolcetto (a normally dry Italian variety), as consumer favourites.

And the people who buy them love them fervently, often driving hundreds of kilometres to stock up. Don’t ever believe that only experts are prepared to go out of their way to buy cases of wine, laughed Ross.

Of course there’s nothing new in people being attracted to sweet and fruity wine. It’s been a constant theme in Australia since the release of Orlando Barossa Pearl in 1956.

The difference now seems to be that most winemakers don’t take these styles seriously — and it shows in their mediocre offerings. What Brown Brothers have demonstrated is that occasional wine drinkers become enthusiastic wine drinkers when you give them what they want.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007

As far north and as coastal as it is, the lower Hunter Valley ought to be too warm, too wet, too humid — and with Sydney so close — too expensive to make wine. But it’s done so for 170 years and is today probably more varied and more innovative than at any time in its history.

The first grapes were probably planted there in the late 1820’s and vines were certainly part of the agricultural mix by the early 1830s, with six growers listed in a report of 1832, according to James Halliday in The Wines and History of the Hunter (McGraw-Hill, 1979).

The name of one of those growers, George Wyndham, lives on today in the Wyndham Estate brand, owned by the French controlled Pernod Ricard Pacific.

And readers of my vintage might recall ‘Dalwood, a now defunct Penfolds Hunter Valley wine brand (named for George Wyndham’s property) and ‘Kirkton’ as a once popular Lindemans label named for a Hunter property acquired in 1825 by vine pioneer James Busby.

But that’s the old days, before the Hunter boasted even one resort or golf club. Despite many setbacks, its winemaking survived and grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and prospered into the twenty-first.

Today, according to one wine industry database, the Hunter has about 160 winemakers with the greatest concentration in the lower Hunter near Cessnock rather than in the upper Hunter in the vicinity of Denman.

Despite the significant quantity of grapes grown in the upper Hunter, it’s the lower Hunter that produces the region’s two great and idiosyncratic specialties: semillon and shiraz – styles revered by Australian and foreign connoisseurs but with little popular currency beyond the Sydney market.

but the lower Hunter’s proximity to Sydney and Newcastle provides a big flow of tourists happy to explore a range of wine offerings that goes well beyond the two traditional specialities.

It’s a mix of big, small, old and new from the large McWilliams Mount Pleasant to tiny Chateau Pato to glamorous Tempus Two to seventies’ boom star Brokenwood to family oldies like Drayton’s and Tyrrell’s.

In this varied landscape, semillon, shiraz, chardonnay and verdelho lead the charge. But if you seek Little’s Winery at Broke you’ll find former Canberran, Suzanne Little, and husband Ian, making delicious, aromatic Gewurztraminer.

Just down the road, Robin Tedder’s Glenguin blends the exotic tannat with shiraz while Andrew Margan puts a friendly drink-now face on the traditional shiraz and semillon but also makes a delightful red from the Italian variety, barbera.

Quite a few wineries, including Reece and Garth Eather’s Meerea Park now produce that wonderful white, viognier and pinot gris is on the radar.

The latter generally fares better in cooler climates, so it’s not surprising that Tempus Two looks to Victoria’s King Valley for this variety. And makes a very good wine from it.

Nearby, in the Lusby family’s tiny Tintilla vineyard, the Italian variety sangiovese grows beside the time-proven specialties. It’s promising. But will it still be there in 100 years? Could be!

And innovation need not be limited to introducing new varieties. The greatest wines emerging from the Hunter, in my opinion, remain the traditional regional specialties, semillon and shiraz. And these are being polished to a new gloss by both new and old makers, notably McWilliams and, perhaps a nose in front, Tyrrell’s.

Like most complex wine areas, the best way to understand the Hunter is through its wines. And there’s no better way than to hop in the car, go there and wander amongst the vines for a few day.

Copyright © Chris Shanahan 2007