Wine of the Year: Rosemount Estate Mountain Blue 1996

The picturesque wine area of Mudgee, surrounded by the hills of NSW’s central highlands, has long had an image problem. True, Orlando Wyndham has invested heavily in it and equally true, wineries like Huntington Estate, Miramar, Botobolar and Thistle Hill have released some exceptional wines on occasions. But Mudgee’s problem is that in lacking a true prestige wine it has not been able to reveal its full potential to the wine community and so experience the spin-off benefits in sales that a benchmark wine can bring. How much ordinary Hunter Valley red sells on the back of the region’s few true but genuine classics?

So, enter stage left Rosemount’s Mountain Blue, a shiraz vineyard planted forty-five years ago and whose vines are now as thick and sinewy as Viv Richards’ forearms. Planted on deep red soils and yielding a reluctant half-tonne to the acre, its shiraz has changed the way I regard Mudgee’s wine and its potential. Its wine is long, clear and highly flavoured with attractive spices and dark cherry and raspberry fruit. Its firm extract of fine tannins and assertive, almost sour acidity are strangely suggestive of top-notch Chianti.
Rosemount’s first Mountain Blue wine was made in 1994, a year before the company took ownership of the vineyard. Like the wines to succeed it, it has been supplemented with around 10 of cabernet sauvignon from a nearby vineyard whose name is equally evocative of the area’s mining heritage, Hill of Gold. Its soils are tough and gravelly and its vines work hard to surrender their 1.5 to 2 tonnes per acre.

I agree entirely with Phillip Shaw, Rosemount’s chief winemaker, whose view is that the lifted, vibrant fruit flavours of the Hill of Gold’s cabernet ably support the dense berry fruit of Mountain Blue’s shiraz, lending more backbone and complexity to the wine. He makes the wine with a typically warm fermentation, using extended skin contact to extract the finest tannins from the grape skins. And while he began by using equal parts of French and American oak for the inaugural 1994 vintage, he has tended to adopt more finer-grained French oak with successive wines.

The 1994 Mountain Blue not only took all before it in the wine shows, but it generated a huge response across the media. It still keeps popping up in comparative tastings, doing well time and again. Its wild, brambly and piercingly intense fruit is beautifully married with smoky, cedary oak, while its tannins are firm, strong and tight. It should last for twenty years. It rates 18.2 and will drink best after 2006.

Next came the 1995 wine 18.6, drink 2007+, a more stylish and modern expression of vibrant, translucent fruit and with a fragrant, almost heady aroma of violets and blueberries. Another long-term wine with a long, creamy and seamless palate, it is precise, balanced and very stylish indeed.
The 1996 vintage 18.8, drink 2008+, is a dark, spicy, brooding wine of both power and restraint. One of the best wines ever made by Phillip Shaw, it has just been released. Deeply concentrated with flavours of black cherries and plums, cassis and chocolate oak, it is initially succulent and fleshy, before its dense dark fruit culminates in a deliciously racy sour edge. Its acidity and fine-grained tannic backbone go on forever and ever. True, its price of $45 is more expensive, but I can’t imagine anybody thinking this wine anything but a bargain once the taste test is applied.

Keenly aware that its Mountain Blue would resemble a shag on a rock – albeit a rather decorative shag at that – without some company from the same region, Rosemount is also developing an affordable collection of sub-$20 Mudgee varietal wines whose label is yet to be finalised. From the Hill of Gold vineyard, the 1998 cabernet is taught, lean and slightly leafy, but should flesh out with time in oak, while the shiraz a reveals excellent structure and a mouthfilling presence of ripe, spicy fruit. Each is a beautifully presented wine with some of the brightly-flavoured sweet-sour fruit of the Mountain Blue, plus some of its length and fineness.

Determined to guarantee its supply of Mudgee fruit, Rosemount is presently developing the huge Cumbandry Vineyard, planting it mainly to red varieties. On perfect deep red soils it received its first 150 acres of vines in 1997. Another 500 are presently being planted, with yet another 500 scheduled for 1999. The most remarkable thing about this vineyard is the fact that to overcome extremely restrictive NSW legislation concerning the trapping of run-off from rainfall, Rosemount is constructing a 24 km pipeline to carry irrigation water from a distant river. You don’t get any more committed than that. Please login to post comment