Mount Pleasant Lovedale Semillon 2021

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Mount Pleasant Lovedale Semillon 2021.

Mount Pleasant Lovedale Semillon 2021
$100, 11% alcohol, screwcap, Mount Pleasant.

From a vineyard planted by Maurice O’Shea on the Hunter Valley floor in 1946 – as soon as the war ended. If you want more of a run-up to this wine, read [The Vineyard Maurice O'Shea Planted, Reborn in the Glass].

O’Shea wore thick glasses. If he tasted this wine he’d, at the very least, put them down, and might even throw them away.

There’s silk to this wine but it’s the intensity, the length, the smash of shells, the crush of citrus, the way wax lines the palate and then lays out leaves and juice and brine and herb notes in formation and in full view as if nothing in this wine is for hiding and everything in it is for certain. It’s a wine with a life and a force and a future, guaranteed. It’s five years old but it’s only just recently shed the callipers of infancy and started in on its run. There’ll be no stopping it.
97 points – Campbell Mattinson.

Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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