Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant is a Mattinson 10-Star Winery — Campbell Mattinson's highest honour.
Its history as the birthplace of fine Australian table wine makes it, arguably, Australia's most important wine estate.
Mount Pleasant is the name on the label of many of the greatest Australian wines ever made, and it remains a legend of both the past and the present. Since Maurice O'Shea first walked onto the property in 1921, its legendary vineyards — Old Hill, Rosehill and Lovedale — have stayed in the estate's care for over a century, tended in turn by O'Shea himself, and later Phil Ryan, Jim Chatto and current winemaker Adrian Sparks. Shiraz and Semillon rule supreme here, though Pinot Noir, in its own distinctive way, has its grand moments too. If you'd visited in the 1940s, you'd have been spellbound; the experience today is far more luxurious, but the wines in the glass are every bit as stellar.
Mount Pleasant is where O'Shea built the foundations of fine Australian table wine, working without electricity and often without profit, in pursuit of a wine style Australia had never really had before. His story — and the night his memory came full circle over a shared bottle with James Halliday — is told in [Halliday's Last O'Shea] and in Campbell Mattinson's biography, [The Wine Hunter].
