On Wednesday, McWilliams celebrated the twenty-five years that winemaker Phil Ryan has been at the helm of its Mount Pleasant winery in the Hunter Valley. It did so with a tasting of twenty-five wines representing each of the different seasons, plus a full-on effort at Tetsuya’s in Sydney, at which another selection of top-rated Mount Pleasant wines were put to the test against Tetsuya Wakada’s innovative cuisine. One of the interesting things to come from the tasting was to realise that McWilliams has strongly moved away from the presence of brettanomyces in one of its premier wines, the Maurice O’Shea Shiraz, at precisely the same time as many wineries in this country would appear to have embraced it. The 1987 and 1994 vintages of this wine were clearly strongly influenced by the horsehair and farmyard flavours of this spoilage yeast, not to mention the drying astringency it imparts to the wine backwards from the finish. The 1998 vintage, a more modern, balanced and structured wine, appeared to be entirely free of brett, which clearly had some role to play in the ‘sweaty saddle’ character so typical of many old-fashioned Hunter reds. I think they’re better off without it. The star wines of the event? The Lovedale Semillons from 1996 (19.0), 1986 (19.0) and 1984 (18.9), then the Elizabeth Semillons from 1986 (18.8), 1982 (18.7), 1994 (18.6). The leading reds were the Maurice O’Shea Shirazes from 1991 and 2000 (both 18.3) and 1998 (18.2).
