Vat 1 – The Hunter’s No.1 Semillon

It’s 1997 and still Australians doubt that our white wines age. Unforgivable. It’s a crying shame there’s not enough 1970 Tyrrells Vat 1 to pour down the neck of every doubting Thomas, since this 27 year-old beauty is ageing as gracefully as the Empire State.

There’s nothing fluky about the health and freshness of this wine, as confirmed by a walk through a multitude of Vat 1 vintages from 1970 through to the latest into bottle, from the tricky 1997 season. The wines from 1977 and 1978 are stellar examples of the unimaginable complexity and character that unoaked semillons from the Hunter have traditionally developed when given the chance. Both remain fresh and tight after two decades, offering great length of buttery, toasty flavours and a lingering, savoury finish.

Vat 1’s story began in 1963 and although the Vat 47 Chardonnay has stolen much of the limelight in recent years, it remains one of the great benchmark wines of the Hunter. Lindemans, one of the other legendary producers of the style, has reduced its range to just a single label, the Hunter River Semillon, although it has diluted this traditional wine with up to 15 of fruit from other regions. Rothbury’s excellent unoaked semillon remains a flag-bearer, while the semillons from Mount Pleasant, especially those bottled under the Lovedale Vineyard label, are amongst the last of those with a long-term heritage in the true Hunter style.

‘There’s no sense fermenting semillon in oak’, barks Murray Tyrrell, whose oral aperture is aptly interwoven into Hunter legend and lore. ‘You’d need a trip to the doctor if you do, since you’d get no palate at all. We used to ferment inside old French and German oak casks between 500 and 1000 gallons until 1983 and since 1990 we’ve entirely used stainless steel. New oak strips away the grape’s natural flavours.’

Classic Hunter semillons need sandy soils over clay podsols. The first Vat 1 was made entirely from grapes picked at the Short Flat vineyard, but the wine is today supplemented from the Long Flat and HVD vineyards which, as Tyrrell explains, are located in same creek bed as Short Flat. ‘Semillon is subject to infection from botrytis, but the reflection you get back from sand helps to fix it’, he says.

The distinctive semillon style we today associate with the Hunter Valley owes much to the region’s incidence of hail around vintage. Before allowances were made for bad weather, says Tyrrell, the conventional Hunter semillon was a big, overdeveloped wine picked at high sugar levels in unusual seasons, one expects, prior to fermentation in open casks with no temperature control. Severe hail in 1958, 1960 and 1962 led Tyrrells to harvest on reflex after their first sighting of threatening clouds. ‘This immediately increased their acidity and freshness and enhanced their keeping abilities’, says Tyrrell.

When Tyrrells introduced temperature-controlled fermentation in the late 1960s they were further able to preserve the grape’s delicate fruit and acid balance, creating a style more likely to develop finesse with age.

Murray Tyrrell isn’t afraid to admit that prior to the installation of a heat exchanger at the winery, what the old winemakers refer to as ‘the old black water snake’ the hose would be deployed to achieve a similar result. ‘Sometimes we threw in a shade too much’, he confesses, with a wry smile. ‘A small volume of water is best of all. In 1965, ’67 and ’68 we ‘broke down’ the wine with ice. The lower the alcohol and the cleaner the wine, the better.’ Good old Australian ingenuity strikes again!

Although the modern wines shamelessly reveal their high-tech origins, in reality there’s not a great deal that’s altered in Tyrrells’ making of Vat 1 over the years. The fruit generally comes in at around 10-11?Beaume, with a pH in the range 3.1-3.3 and an ideal titratable acidity of 7.5 g/l. The fruit is crushed immediately on receival at the winery, before a period of 48 hours cold settling prior to fermentation regulated between 14-16?C. The wine is left on lees for a period of between one to eight weeks, wet years receiving a longer period of contact so they develop more colour and character. Once stabilised and cleaned up, they’re bottled in late June to early July, but not released to the market until around five years of age.

Like so many unwooded white wines, Hunter semillon enjoys a brief spell of vibrant drinkability while crisp, delicate and young, revealing lightly grassy lemon/honeydew melon and straw-like fruit with fresh acids. After a flat spell between two to four years of age, they come into their own again, gradually turning complex, toasty and honeyed, with suggestions of butter, bread and roasted nuts. I’m comfortable with Tyrrells’ own estimates that normal vintages tend to be ten-year wines, while the better years can live for twenty of more.

Amazingly enough, even in a terrible season like 1997, Tyrrells have fashioned a stunner.

To present the company’s own view of its wines, the Tyrrells believe their great years to be 1964, 1967, 1970, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1979, 1986, 1987 and 1992, which clearly shows a greater degree of comfort that I exhibit with botrytis in the style. As ever, it’s a personal thing.

It’s timely to be thinking of great Australian white wines made from grapes other than chardonnay. There are plenty of them and they’re comparatively cheap. An icon in Sydney, Vat 1 still doesn’t receive the reverence it’s due in other markets as a great Australian wine of tradition, heritage and faithfulness to style and outright quality. It’s something very special indeed.

What else could I do but leave the last word to Murray Tyrrell, who proudly declared: ‘There’s nobody else coming out to beat us.’ While I wouldn’t agree entirely, it was a joy to hear the passion as he said it. Please login to post comment