It’s embarrassing to admit it, but the other week I made my first trip to Mudgee. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mudgee, I might add, but you’d think I would have been there before now. Mudgee has been making some serious wine for several decades. The wines of Montrose, Huntington Estate, Thistle Hill, Botobolar, Miramar and Craigmoor have for years provided honest, and on occasions spectacular wine, usually at the most affordable of prices. Mudgee was the first Australian region to properly implement its own scheme to authenticate its wines. For years its generous and flavoursome product has been successfully deployed to beef up more fashionable labels in other regions. But despite all this, and to be perfectly frank, for all its rural character, Mudgee has lacked sex appeal to this Victorian journalist. And then, when I tasted four consecutive vintages of Rosemount’s Mountain Blue Shiraz Cabernet, all that rather changed somewhat. Other than some recent releases from Montrose, Mudgee’s red wines have tended towards the traditional and the rustic. The bulk of the area’s reds are made with shiraz and cabernet sauvignon and they’ve consistently been benchmarks in terms of value for money. But while the occasional releases have been spectacular enough to turn even the most discriminating heads, they’ve not shown enough consistent finesse to have established the region as a serious maker of serious red. Like me, many have wondered just what Mudgee might be able to achieve if given more new oak, more technology and a more consistent supply of water. Enter stage left Rosemount’s Mountain Blue, a shiraz vineyard planted forty-five years ago and whose vines are now as thick and sinewy as Viv Richards’ forearms. Planted on deep red soils and reluctantly yielding a half-tonne to the acre, its shiraz has changed the way many people are thinking about Mudgee wine. Its wine is long, clear and highly flavoured with attractive spices and dark cherry and raspberry fruit. Its firm extract of fine tannins and assertive acidity are strangely suggestive of quality Barolo, Italy’s famous nebbiolo from Piedmont. It’s a wine with purpose, and that purpose is to be cellared for at least ten years, after which its hard, polished edges should have softened and by which time its depth of fruit and oak should have produced some extraordinary flavours. Rosemount’s first Mountain Blue wine was made in 1994, a year before the company took ownership of the vineyard. Like the wines to succeed it, it has been supplemented with around 10% of cabernet sauvignon from a nearby vineyard whose name is equally evocative of the area’s mining heritage, Hill of Gold. Its soils are tough and gravelly and its vines work hard for their 1.5 to 2 tonnes per acre. Like Mountain Blue, it has recently received the facilities for drip irrigation, but irrigation whose purpose is strictly one of vine maintenance during the sorts of droughts that New South Wales has come to know so well in recent years. Phillip Shaw, Rosemount’s chief winemaker, believes that the lifted, vibrant fruit flavours of the Hill of Gold’s cabernet ably supports the dense berry fruit of Mountain Blue’s shiraz, giving more support and complexity to the wine. He makes the wine with a typically warm fermentation, using extended skin contact to extract the finest tannins from the grape skins. While he began by using equal parts of French and American oak for the inaugural 1994 vintage, he has tended to adopt more finer-grained French oak with successive wines. The 1994 Mountain Blue not only took all before it in the wine shows, but it generated a huge response across the media. It still keeps popping up in comparative tastings, doing well time and again. Its wild, brambly fruit of piercing intensity is beautifully married with smoky, cedary oak, while its tannins are firm, strong and tight. It should last for twenty years. Currently available is the 1995 wine, a more stylish and modern expression of vibrant, translucent fruit and with a fragrant, almost heady aroma of violets and blueberries. Another long-term wine with a long, creamy and seamless palate, it is precise, balanced and very stylish indeed. It’s about the traps for around $35 a bottle, at which price it looks awfully cheap. November this year will see the release of the 1996 vintage, one of the best red wines ever made by Phillip Shaw. It’s a dark, spicy, brooding wine of power and restraint. Deeply concentrated with flavours of black cherries and plums, cassis and chocolate oak, it is initially succulent and fleshy, before its dense dark fruit culminates in a deliciously sour edge. Its acidity and fine-grained tannic backbone go on forever and ever. True, its price of $45 is more expensive, but I can’t imagine anybody thinking this wine anything but a bargain once given the taste test. Keenly aware that its Mountain Blue would resemble a shag on a rock – albeit a rather decorative shag at that – without some company from the same region, Rosemount is also developing an affordable collection of Mudgee varietal wines whose label is yet to be finalised. I have tasted barrel samples of 1998 reds made with each of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz from the Hill of Gold vineyard, both of which are destined for this range. The cabernet is taught, lean and slightly leafy, but should flesh out with time in oak. Pick of the wines was the shiraz, a wine of excellent structure and with a mouthfilling presence of ripe, spicy fruit. Each is a beautifully presented wine with some of the brightly-flavoured sweet-sour fruit of the Mountain Blue, plus some of its length and fineness. Rosemount presently expect the wines to retail for less than $20, in which case they will offer outstanding value for money. Such is its degree of newfound commitment to the Mudgee area that Rosemount is presently developing a huge vineyard, to be largely planted to red varieties, to guarantee its Mudgee fruit supply. On perfect deep red soils its Cumbandry Vineyard received its first 150 acres of vines in 1997. Another 500 are presently being planted, with yet another 500 scheduled for 1999. Other than its size and the speed at which it is being developed, the most remarkable thing about this vineyard is the fact that to overcome extremely restrictive NSW legislation concerning the trapping of run-off from rainfall, Rosemount is constructing a 24 km pipeline to carry irrigation water from a nearby river. And you can’t get any more committed than that.
