The Vineyard Maurice O'Shea Planted, Reborn in the Glass
If you ever want to know what exactly is so special about wine, as a category, then just have a think about this new release from Mount Pleasant. It was grown on a vineyard – named Lovedale – that was planted in the Hunter Valley in 1946. The first wine this vineyard grew was from the 1950 vintage. This all sounds grand in a humdrum kind of way, the latter because there are a lot of old vineyards in Australia, and blessed be that so. But here’s where the story kicks up a gear. Because between the early 1920s and 1946 there was bloke working away up the hill, on the Mount Pleasant estate. His name was Maurice O’Shea. No one much cared about what O’Shea was doing up there, or about the wines he was making. In fact, for his entire 30+ years of making wine there, the estate never turned a profit. The thing was though, that decades later, once the collective palate of Australia had matured a bit, people started to care a great deal about those O’Shea years, spent toiling away on a dirt-floor winery. They did because the wines that he left behind became legendary, courtesy of their quality. So legendary that people now spend thousands and thousands of dollar in the hope of securing themselves a mere thimble-full [Halliday’s Last O’Shea].
There was no electricity at Mount Pleasant, through the entirety of O’Shea’s years there. He would have sat there each night, by himself, by candle-light, or by oil lamp. Just before the light faded completely each day though he would have had a view down the hill and into the valley. The vineyard O’Shea worked at Mount Pleasant had already been planted when he got there. At some point, some late day-night getting on to 1946, he must have decided that his hill was great for shiraz and even for pinot noir, but that he needed to plant a vineyard with semillon vines down on the sandy old sea bed floor of the valley, and that he needed to call this vineyard Lovedale.
This vineyard of course isn’t just rows of vines, dug into sandy loam. It’s a vision and it’s a marriage; it’s the result of a French-Australian-Irish bloke who’s life was drenched in wine, and who had time to think on it, and who saw that one plus one equalled five, or something like that, in that semillon vines plus that specific patch of land could produce something far beyond what either of them could be expected to do in isolation.
News release: Mount Pleasant has just released its Lovedale Vineyard Cellar Aged Semillon 2021.
I didn’t think of any other of the above, prior to tasting the wine. In fact I was sitting at my work desk when I opened it, and it was cold, so cold in fact that my split system heater was struggling to keep up. I planned to taste the wine, review it, finish up with the other wines on my table, and get home.
But then I took a sip. And suddenly, everything came flooding at me. I pushed my keyboard and my mouse away. It’s only wine, some say. It’s just a drink, others chime. These people know nothing – or, more to the point, have never cared to stop, and respect, and reflect, and let a wine like this come in and come home to them.
Read my review of the [Mount Pleasant Lovedale Vineyard Cellar Aged Semillon 2021].
