Rosemount Estate, the brash new kid on the block of the 1970s, has turned 25. With those twenty-five years the brashness has given way for a more assured self-confidence founded on the realisation it can make a wine to satisfy virtually every wine buyer in Australia. It would be hard to imagine being unable to find a wine to enjoy from a collection that not only includes the more rarefied labels of Balmoral Shiraz, the Show Reserve and Roxburgh Chardonnays, Show Reserve Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon and Mountain Blue Cabernet Shiraz, but a welter of sound, expressive and remarkably reliable and affordable labels like the diamond label Chardonnay and Shiraz, plus the blended Grenache Shiraz and Shiraz Cabernet. If Rosemount’s wines have a stamp, then that stamp is attitude. Not for chief winemaker Philip Shaw is the idea of making wine for its own sake. Each label, from the most basic and inexpensive upward, appears has style, purpose and direction. Like them or leave them as individuals, it’s awfully hard to miss any point that Shaw is intending to make. I am no longer amazed at the number of winemakers who view wines like Mountain Blue and the Grenache Shiraz with such awe, opposite points of the pricing scale they may be. Shaw is a consummate professional who still spends around four hours each day in the winery simply tasting blends and components. He’s a maker’s maker, but he’s also crucially concerned with how the public perceives his wine. ‘I love reserve wines and get great enjoyment from them. I’d love only to be making them’, he says. ‘But with our reserve wines, whose style is very defined, the challenge is to create your own expression of that style year after year. With our more commercial wines it’s more an idea of trying to second-think people and figuring what they want. It’s a very interesting challenge because it is about trying to understand different people and markets.’ ‘Looking ahead means being innovative, so we’re trying to do things that other makers don’t or are just starting to do. I’ve spent a lot of time just tasting and mucking around trying to get things right with the Grenache Shiraz and Shiraz Cabernet. But I’m never happy with whatever we do.’ It said much about the way that Rosemount sees itself that at a recent dinner to celebrate its first 25 years, after an entire day spent tasting an extraordinary number of its best wines from a large number of vintages, the company served nine year-old magnums of its diamond label chardonnay and shiraz. It’s clearly prepared to hang its hat on the wines that most people are buying. ‘We’ve absolute confidence in our benchmark quality’, says Shaw. ‘Although they’re released as relatively young wines, our diamond labels are based on full flavour, richness of fruit, full tannin levels and drinkability. They might be light in body while young, but they’ve lived on for a long time, much longer than some would expect.’ I share Shaw’s lack of faith in the majority of commercially priced Australian chardonnays, many of which reflect their hasty making and inherent shortcuts such as poorly-extracted oak character and over-played skin contact. They flower, after a fashion, for a short period, before a rapid and inevitable decay. Shaw has always made a point of making even his basic chardonnay in a classical way. It’s a wine which always includes a malolactic component and achieves its firmness through oak tannins, not through skins. ‘We’ve been doing this for nearly 15 years now’, he says. ‘Everybody thought chardonnay was easy to make and grew it everywhere like a weed. It relied heavily on alcohol for its smoothness and texture and not enough on fruit varietal character. I think there’s more of a need for an expression of fruit. People are now realising that chardonnay isn’t necessarily suited to all regions and that it’s harder to make than we first thought. A lot of modern chardonnays are totally out of kilter, way out of style’, he says. Shaw estimates that ninety percent of winemakers feel they’ve mastered chardonnay and is concerned that they’re taking their eyes off the ball, looking for other challenges. I wholeheartedly share his view that only a handful are actually making world-class chardonnay and that winemakers’ minds should be more open and less closed to new regions and ideas. ‘Because of the resource base is becoming so much larger, there will be ever increasing pressure to improve quality around world’, he believes. Throughout the 1990s Rosemount has become a truly national wine maker. While its heart and soul will never leave its site on the Goulburn River floodplain at Rosemount Road, Denman, where an entirely new winery is presently being completed, the company’s vineyard assets of almost 4,000 acres reflect a mature approach to the matching of variety with region. Rosemount has always upheld the Upper Hunter as its principal source of quality chardonnay and semillon. Its Roxburgh Vineyard is not only responsible for the flagship wine which bears its name, but with the Giants Creek vineyard provides a significant portion of what many consider to be Rosemount’s most sophisticated white wine, the Show Reserve Chardonnay. It was the preferred Rosemount chardonnay at Wine Magazine’s Top 20 Chardonnay Tasting. The rather idiosyncratic, barrel fermented Show Reserve Semillon is also an Upper Hunter wine. When the Oatley family planted its first vines in the Upper Hunter, it began with the fruit salad mix typical of so many Australian vineyards. Beginning with shiraz and traminer, it also acquired plantings in the area with chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, riesling, semillon and sauvignon blanc. Non unnaturally, the company commenced by assembling a range of different varietal wines based around this single region. A recent taste of late ’70s Rosemount wines made from traminer, semillon (then called ‘Riesling’), riesling (labelled as ‘Rhine Riesling’) and sauvignon blanc revealed honest, is perhaps rather simple varietal qualities in most grapes. Not unsurprisingly, the semillon (1976 vintage) was the most complex and interesting. But this is where Rosemount has really changed. Instead of attempting to follow so many Australian wine companies by developing a brace of regional brands which include all of the major varieties, red and white, it has preferred instead to pick the eyes out of a large number of possible regional and varietal combinations in New South Wales, South Australia and even Victoria. In so doing it has ceded some element of its Upper Hunter Valley identity, but has emerged in my mind as something far better: a self-confident medium-sized national brand. And as such it leads the way for many medium-sized companies, boasting a range and resource as diverse and marketable as major brands many times its size. Cabernet sauvignon from Coonawarra, shiraz and grenache from McLaren Vale, shiraz and cabernet from Mudgee and Langhorne Creek, chardonnay from the Upper Hunter, the Yarra Valley, Mudgee, Orange, riesling from Clare – it’s an enviable list and one which will just get bigger and better. Philip Shaw believes that Rosemount has found it so easy to shift its regional focus because they were less tied to vineyard resources than most wine companies of similar size. ‘People don’t necessarily see the Upper Hunter as being true Hunter, so that let us be more open to other ideas of what we should be’, he says. ‘We started with Coonawarra, with a vineyard developed with heaps of different varieties and found only doing anything: cabernet sauvignon. So we grafted everything over with that.’ Sadly, there was another variety from which Rosemount make a decade of stellar, but largely unnoticed Coonawarra red wine: merlot. Presented as either Show Reserve Merlot or Kirribilli Merlot, it just didn’t sell. With merlot’s rising profile it must gnaw at the feelings of Shaw & Co. that they’re presently watching from the sidelines at a race they might well be winning. McLaren Vale was next. With an eye on the ripeness and concentration of shiraz and grenache from this rejuvenated region, Shaw’s team began to evolve the style that began as Show Shiraz, which has since become their most expensive red in Balmoral Syrah. It’s based around very mature vines growing on a mix of three different soil types: red, black and beach sand. Although Rosemount owns a winery in the region, Balmoral is actually made in the Upper Hunter. ‘There’s quite some value in having the fruit sitting around cold for quite a period of time’, says Shaw. Its purchase of Ryecroft in 1991 firmed up Rosemount’s fruit supply in the region and directly led to the creation of its GSM (grenache, shiraz, mourvedre) and Traditional regional blends (cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit verdot). Shaw clearly enjoys the GSM. ‘It’s all picked from old bush vines, the best of which are on sandy soils, very low yielding and lacking vigour. The shiraz we select for the GSM is sweeter and not as intense as that for Balmoral, but it’s more elegant. Its role is to give the grenache more backbone and depth since the powerful confection flavours of grenache can be too sweet. We use mourvedre for its backbone.’ If Philip Shaw has a particular regional banner to wave, then that region is Orange. He was one of the first champions of the cooler volcanic slopes of Mount Canobolas and has a large personal stake in a significant vineyard there. Although he’d love to discover that Orange could produce pinot to rival some of the country’s more southerly regions, he is more than satisfied with the silky but flinty-finishing chardonnay it’s already making. To this time Shaw’s best red wines from Orange have been made with cabernet franc and merlot and he hasn’t tossed out the idea of blending them together in sort of a right-bank Bordeaux fashion. It’s at Mudgee where Rosemount is most likely to turn conventional wisdom on its head, although nobody’s yet sure with what varieties. ‘It’s a wonderful area that has been neglected’, says Shaw. ‘We found some varieties showing out strongly there and began to build a picture of what it could do. I see reds as its main forte, with Italian varieties playing a big part. ‘Once we’ve been able to control its water, we’ve uncovered this superb area whose climate is similar to McLaren Vale, but whose wines have more backbone, are more steely and classical in style. In contrast, McLaren Vale is more modern Australian in style. Mudgee’s semillon is also quite good, but where is that variety going? ‘We don’t feel we have to commit too much to any particular grape and with our experience in the Hunter we’ve been pretty quick to change varieties in the past. We’ve been from shiraz to traminer and then to chardonnay and if it was a different region we would possibly go back to shiraz. We’ve an open, freewheeling mindset of what we should do. And living in the Hunter, you’re always a born optimist!’ For the time being, the Mountain Blue blend of shiraz and cabernet sauvignon has shown after just three releases that Mudgee can make red wine of the highest class. It’s Rosemount’s intention to transfer its success to a new series of competitively priced varietal wines from its new and existing plantings in the region. It’s early days, but I’ve been very impressed with the length and bright, translucent flavours of samples I’ve been shown of these young wines. Either way, there’s no questioning Rosemount’s commitment to the region, given that it’s building a seventeen-kilometre pipeline to transfer water from the Cudgegong River to its new thousand-acre Cumbandry Vineyard. Rosemount has also developed a new and largely red wine vineyard at Langhorne Creek whose chardonnay has actually surpassed Shaw’s expectations. It also purchases a small amount of Clare Valley riesling, a variety that Shaw believes performs its best work in Clare. Restless as ever, Shaw is still looking around. He’s already buying some Yarra Valley chardonnay and doing very well with it, but is keen to get his hands dirty with shiraz and pinot noir from Geelong as well as Heathcote shiraz. ‘Heathcote makes a style of shiraz I find very interesting, with plenty of depth and character. I’d also like to see what it does with Italian varieties’, he muses. One thing’s for certain. This restless, hands-on winemaker who with the backing of the Oatley family has always been prepared to challenge the styles of the multitude, isn’t about to die wondering.
