The Wine Hunter

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An open-flat version of Campbell Mattinson’s The Wine Hunter book cover, showing the back cover, the spine and the front cover.

In 2006 I started writing a book on a winemaker from the 1920s, a winemaker named Maurice O’Shea, a man who sacrificed both his love and his life in the fanatical pursuit of Great Australian Wine – which, until this pursuit, had never really existed. I wrote this story in eight weeks (which, admittedly, was as close to 24-hours-a-day writing as I could physically achieve). I called this book The Wine Hunter.
James Halliday said of The Wine Hunter: ‘it’s not a wine geek book but an epic.’ Max Allen said “this is the best book on wine to be published in Australia in many, many years.” The Wine Hunter book has now been through five re-prints though all of these re-prints are now sold out, other than perhaps via the Mount Pleasant cellar door direct. The Wine Hunter won the top gong at the Australian Wine Communicator Awards in 2006. In 2016 the revised (hard-cover) edition of The Wine Hunter won the Chairman’s Prize at the Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards in London.

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The Wine Hunter is a novel-like story of one of Australian wine’s most important and totemic journeys. It is Australian wine history at its most vivid.

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At the time its fourth re-relasde, in 2016, I noted:

In 2006 James Halliday called The Wine Hunter book “One of the most remarkable wine books to come my way … It will capture anyone who reads it: this is not a wine geek book but an epic.”

Australia’s first great winemaker was a Frenchman. As a 24 year old, in 1921, he walked onto a hillside vineyard in the Hunter Valley north-west of Sydney, and in a hot, soggy climate set about growing and crafting wines that, when finally opened as fifty- and sixty-year-olds, became renowned as Australia’s first great wines. He made these wines without electricity, with bare bones equipment – his winery, Mount Pleasant never once turned a profit during his 30 year struggle – and with a broken heart. What he achieved out there on that hillside is one of the miracles of wine. The Wine Hunter is Maurice O’Shea’s remarkable story.

I wrote The Wine Hunter ten years ago. It sold out many moons ago and has been out of print since. Almost every week, I receive an email from somewhere in the world, from someone trying to source a copy. It’s never been officially available outside of Australia. Until now. An updated and expanded (definitive) version is (or was in 2016) now available across the major e-book platforms – iBooks and Amazon – for the princely sum of US $8.99.

This is now the book I always wanted and imagined it to be.

When it was first published, Max Allen in the The Australian Magazine called it (as noted above) “The best book on wine to be published in Australia for many, many years”. The book was fortunate to find other friends, among them:

Paddy Kendlar, Melbourne Herald-Sun: “I started reading a wine book last weekend and finished it on the Sunday night. Literally couldn’t put it down, except to take a break when the story became somewhat sad … It’s a wonderful story with a perception and sensitivity almost matching that of the subject. The few O’Shea wines that I have tasted – made under the McWilliams Mount Pleasant label – were more than forty years old at the time. They were magnificent. Campbell Mattinson has captured the essence of a great Australian artist. I heartily commend this remarkable book.”

Jeni Port, The Age: “Wine Hunter is a breakthrough wine book: an astonishing, cerebral, emotional entanglement of fact and dramatisation, of tender detail and beautiful, expressive words. Has there ever been a wine book written quite this way?”

Jancis Robinson, jancisrobinson.com: “Campbell Mattinson (who) is arguably Australia’s most literate, and certainly most literary, wine writer. I have never met him, incidentally, but admire his monograph on the Hunter Valley pioneer Maurice O’Shea immensely.”

Grant Dodd, thewiningpro.com: “This is a genuine call to those of you that love wine and/or love great writing to go out and buy “The Wine Hunter”, by Campbell Mattinson, one of the most inspired pieces of writing in any genre by an Austalian writer for some time. A biopic of sorts on the life of the great but underappreciated Hunter Valley winemaker Maurice O’Shea, “The Wine Hunter” is a beautifully written, emotive story that somehow infiltrates the ghost of O’Shea and brings his undeniable genius to life. It is a great read, and it deserves to be read.”

Even Gary Walsh said nice things about it.

And last week on Twitter, Lisa Perrotti-Brown of The Wine Advocate (at the time) wrote: “Loved The Wine Hunter. A must-read for lovers of Aussie wine.”

The original commercial publication of The Wine Hunter hit bookstores in 2006 and was published by Hachette Australia. I took re-possession of publishing rights to the book in 2009/2010. The technology was there for me to republish the book then; and there seemed to be demand. Truth is, I wanted to be personally ready to do so. I’ve long been humbled, even a little intimidated, by the praise The Wine Hunter book attracted the first time around. I think in a way it promoted a kind of prolonged stage fright/writer’s block. The only way was down. So much so that I’ve been hesitant to put my hand up for it again.

Harper Lee, eat your heart out.

But much water has passed under the bridge since The Wine Hunter’s publication. It matters little but re-editing, re-reading and setting the book up for re-publication over the past couple of months has proven a cathartic personal experience. It prompted me to quit my position as editor at Wine Companion Magazine despite there being no obvious fallback. If you haven’t already, it would mean the world to me if you gave The Wine Hunter a shot or a chance. The story matters. It’s real.

— Campbell Mattinson, 2016.

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This book also led, indirectly, to one of my favourite personal memories in wine: a shared bottle, and a shared meal, with James Halliday himself. I wrote about that night in [Halliday's Last O'Shea].