Given that he’s admitting to a ten-month bout of Alsheimer’s, M. Bruce Tyrrell is more than happy to declare 1998 as the ‘Vintage of the Century’ for the Lower Hunter Valley. Possibly the earliest Hunter vintage ever recorded, Tyrrells completed harvesting their own red grapes by the 19th of February, even earlier than in 1981. ‘I won’t use word ‘delicacy’ when describing these wines’, says Tyrrell, who sounds delighted with the ‘stack of colour and flavour’. ‘We only had fourteen drops of rain for the whole vintage and our harvesting contractors never even had to tow a single machine out of the mud’. Looks like the El Nino does have its good points after all.
