Speaking as a Mexican, the Hunter Valley is all but impossible to understand. Even those who live there and make wine there freely admit it wouldn’t still exist were it another hour’s drive from Sydney. Its soils are frequently poor to marginal, its climate almost entirely unsuitable for viticulture, and it’s struggling hard to create a modern identity. Every vintage seems marked by rainfall or drought, yet down south we’re told not to worry. They’re all Vintages of the Century. Yet strangely, despite these genuine difficulties is the firm reality that the Hunter has been responsible for some of the best wine ever made in Australia. It has also helped foster some of the wine industry’s most opinionated and outspoken mouthpieces, namely Messrs. Tyrrell, McGuigan, Lake, Evans, Halliday and Beeston, to name but a few. Of course they would have it that they shaped the Hunter, but would perhaps find it difficult to argue against the premise that in actuality, the Hunter really played some role in shaping them. On one of my first visits to the Hunter Valley I found myself in a bus full of Sydney wine and food Mafioso. By four in the afternoon, all were watered with a skinful of sparkler and sporting enough bravado to all but intimidate this newly-arrived southern interloper. “What do you mean the Hunter Valley isn’t Australia’s second-largest wine area?” they stuttered. “You’d better get your facts right, sonny.” Isn’t that often the case? Impact is taken in direct proportion to significance, and in Sydney at the very least, the Hunter is Significant. Of course the Hunter’s value and recognition rightly extends south of the Murray. Anyone who has tried either of the remarkable Lindemans Hunter River Burgundies from 1965 or the Lindemans whites from 1968 or 1970 will understand, although I am told these great wines are nothing on the ’59s. Look at the remarkable wines of Lake’s Folly, Tyrrells and McWilliams and see how they have stood the test of time. There’s no need for the Hunter to justify its past. Its present is harder to understand, that’s all. Like many others who saw and believed, I am a convert to old Hunter semillon and shiraz. I was taught that they epitomised Hunter wine and I am yet to find anything comparable to them. Yet their day could be all but over. The secret to the quality of many of the Hunter greats of yesteryear was the same reason most of those very vineyards were ultimately uprooted. Their yields were small and uneconomic; around one tonne per acre. Back when land and labour were cheap, wineries would simply plant more land to make more wine. That’s no longer economically viable. And with the vineyards that went and are still waiting to go, we farewell the classic old Hunter semillons and shirazes, made with their minimal oak and maximum care. Lindemans are still selling their 1970 Hunter whites. Which vintage after this will maintain the standard? Inevitably quality, and ultimately our expectations of classic Hunter styles will have to change. For time, sadly, is part of the classic Hunter equation. The great wines, whites especially, needed that decade or more to come together. When tried young, the self-same wines don’t offer a fraction of the pleasure or appeal, unless if tasted by a budding wine technocrat. They don’t sell these days, not even in Sydney, the Hunter’s very engine room of support. Due applause, then, to McWilliams, for maintaining the legend with Elizabeth. It’s a very different wine from the Lindemans of the past, but it shows as a seven year-old what a well-made Hunter white can become. Hunter wineries have since attempted to substitute the faster-maturing wood-aged styles of semillon for the non-wooded, and to re-create the Hunter’s reputation for white wine around the more instantly fashionable variety of chardonnay. The Hunter pioneered chardonnay in Australia and its leading examples from Tyrrells, Lake’s Folly, Rothbury, Brokenwood, Rosemount and Evans Family would whet anyone’s appetite. But are they as distinctive and recognisably Hunter as the semillons which preceded them? Not on your life. I remember a bizarre conversation with Jacques Lurton, a popular Bordeaux-based French winemaker who makes wine here as well. I asked him which would ultimately make the better wine in Bordeaux – semillon/sauvignon blanc or chardonnay? Chardonnay, he said, without a doubt. Well, why isn’t anyone trying to change the A.O.C. to let chardonnay in, I asked. Don’t be ridiculous, answered Lurton, chardonnay is Burgundy’s grape. I didn’t pretend to understand him then; perhaps I do now. The argument, I’ll grant is purely sentimental. So is much of what makes this industry unique. Clearly the modern Hunter isn’t the place for the sentimentalist. Sentiment doesn’t create markets, reduce costs and pay bills. Chardonnay does, however, and that’s where the Hunter’s future surely lies. It reigns supreme. Show judges crown it, writers rave about it and people drink it. More importantly, you can export it. More vigorous than most other varieties, it has been planted on more productive vineyard sites, becoming more important to the Hunter year by year. Hunter reds were usually clumsy and disjointed while young, but with time, seemingly regardless of which variety was used to make them, came together as a marvellously rich, idiosyncratic and drinkable wine; typically tarry, spicy and earthy. Look at the low-yielding shiraz vineyards of Brokenwood and Tyrrells, taste the Graveyard Vineyard Hermitage, the Vats 5, 9 and 11, and see exactly what these wines were all about. Modern Hunter reds are an unpredictable lot. Enough has been said about Hunter pinot noir. While generally making a perfectly drinkable lighter Hunter dry red after a few years, it generally doesn’t much taste like pinot. Lake’s Folly aside, Hunter cabernet tastes just like Hunter shiraz after a few years. Modern Hunter shiraz, however, bridges an extraordinary range from the spicy, earthy reds of Sutherland, Allandale and McWilliams to a totally new style currently being pioneered by Rothbury Estate, which tastes absolutely brilliant while being almost totally non-Hunter in appearance. It’s a decade of truth for the Hunter Valley. And wine, not aluminium, coal, thoroughbred horses or rhetoric, should see it safely through. And as revealed by Rothbury’s 1991 Reserve Shiraz, recently winner of the Rhone-style Red Trophy at the 1993 International Wine Challenge (London), the Hunter continues to make wine it shouldn’t. Long may it continue to do so.
