Hunter Valley, New South Wales
The Hunter Valley is Australia's wine origin story — winemaking here began in 1825, when James Busby brought the country's first European vine cuttings from across the world, making the Hunter, by most accounts, the cradle of the entire Australian wine industry. George Wyndham and James King planted the first commercial vineyards in 1828, at Dalwood and Kirkton, just a two-hour drive north of what's now Sydney.
What makes the Hunter genuinely remarkable, though, is what survived. Busby's pre-phylloxera European vine cuttings became the ancestors of some of Australia's oldest living vines, and because phylloxera never reached the region, a handful of Hunter estates still produce wine from 11 historic blocks of original plantings on ungrafted European rootstock — vines that are, remarkably, older than almost anything left standing in Europe itself, where the louse wiped out roughly 70% of vineyards in the late 1800s. Dr Henry Lindeman arrived and quickly built a reputation for fine wine, joined over the following decades by the Drayton, Tulloch, Tyrrell, and Wilkinson families, several of whom are still running wineries here today.
The Hunter's signature grape is a genuine oddity, and that's exactly the point. Semillon was first planted around 1830 and went by a string of borrowed names over the decades — Hunter Valley Riesling, Shepherd's Riesling, Hock, Rhine Gold, White Burgundy, even Chablis — before the region settled into making it properly its own. Jancis Robinson has called Hunter Semillon "Australia's gift to the world," and the wine's whole appeal lies in its transformation: picked young and bottled with austere, lemony, grassy character, it can develop over a decade or more into something rich, honeyed, and biscuity — without ever touching oak, which makes the change feel almost magic. The trick is climate, oddly enough working against type: the Hunter's low latitude and humid conditions aren't an obvious recipe for great white wine, but afternoon cloud cover and gentle coastal breezes temper the heat just enough to let the grapes ripen in flavor without racking up too much sugar.
Hunter Chardonnay has its own origin story, equally local and slightly mischievous: Murray Tyrrell, by his own account, once jumped a fence at Penfolds late one night to take cuttings from an experimental Chardonnay vine, planted them in his own vineyard, and the resulting Tyrrell's 1971 Vat 47 Chardonnay is widely credited with kicking off Australia's entire Chardonnay craze. Whether or not the fence-jumping story is entirely true, it's stuck around because it fits the Hunter's whole personality: stubborn, slightly rogue, deeply proud of its own history.
On the red side, Hunter Shiraz carries notes of earthy leather and tar, very different from the bigger, riper styles found in South Australia, and the better examples age gracefully for two decades or more — a regional character that's as much "Hunter" as it is "Shiraz."
In this collection you'll find Hunter Semillon at different stages of its evolution, from young and zesty to aged and honeyed, alongside savoury, earthy Shiraz from some of the oldest working vines on the planet
