Tasting

Rows say more than single glasses. Hunter Semillon is best tasted not as a single glass but as a flight, from the youngest vintage to the oldest. A young wine from Lovedale smells of lime and freshly mown grass. It tastes lean and almost shy, and you can't help wondering what's supposed to be special about it.

After five years, that begins to shift. The first toasty notes mingle with the citrus, while the acidity stays razor-sharp in the background. After ten or fifteen years, the wine flips entirely: honey, toasted bread, a whisper of lanolin. Yet not a trace of sweetness, since sugar was never part of the equation from the start.

In very old bottles from Pokolbin, you sometimes find small, glass-clear crystals at the bottom, and this is tartrate, precipitated tartaric acid, harmless and even a good sign: it shows the wine was never stabilized and still carries its original acidity to this day.

Shiraz tastes completely different, almost like a second wine from another region entirely. On the nose, earth, black pepper, and a touch of leather come before the fruit, and on the palate it stays medium-bodied, never as powerful as a Barossa Shiraz. That's surprising. Anyone expecting a bold wine from the label underestimates this restraint.

Set both wines side by side, and the whole valley suddenly makes sense. The white wine changes over decades, the red wine prefers to whisper from the start rather than shout. That's a rare thing to find in a single region.