Maurice O'Shea, creator spirit of Australian wine, captured in oils

Sacramental wine by Garry Shead 2010
courtesy of Australian Galleries

Nothing's truly new.


Amidst all the chatter about 'natural wine', I popped into the Australian Galleries in a leafy inner-Sydney cul-de-sac recently to have a look at Garry Shead's gorgeous exhibition of new paintings, Love on Mount Pleasant. And these fabulous, whimsical, deeply romantic canvases made me think about how the legendary Hunter Valley winemaker, Shead's uncle, Maurice O'Shea, would be right at home with today's breed of eager young natural grape treaders.


Here was Maurice, devoted to his mature, dry-grown vineyard - already 50 years old when O'Shea was at his winemaking peak in the 1930s - fashioning remarkable, long-lived bottled gems in a dirt-floor tin shed with no electricity. Those vines up there on Mount Pleasant were farmed for decades without chemical herbicide or pesticides - we'd call it organic farming these days. And the wines were made with the minimum of fuss: nothing much added or taken away. Great wine. Slumbering in big old vats. On a dirt floor. Very natural. And revered, now. Iconic, even.

In the kitchen by Garry Shead 2009
courtesy of Australian Galleries

Garry Shead's paintings capture Maurice's obsession, his passion, his connection to his terroir. They capture, too - beautifully - a spirit of place: the light of a hot Hunter summer; bright midday glimpsed through windows in the shed; the relief of violet dusk draping itself over the hills. Shead has been painting the place since early visits to see his uncle in the early 1950s; he knows this country.


There's a mythic quality here, too, in the Chagall-like presence of prancing fawns, floating goats, Bacchus himself, Aphrodite in the form of a black swan ... But this ancient European symbolism is projected through a rough-hewn, thoroughly Australian prism. As Gavin Wilson, exhibition curator says in the catalogue notes: 'the artist, through an intensely personal experience, has illuminated a little-known narrative that lies at the heart of our nation’s cultural life.'

Maurice with Bandicoot by Garry Shead 1966
courtesy of Australian Galleries

The exhibition runs until Nov 27. If you're not in Sydney, you can check it out online: Australian Galleries

Gathering the Hunter's heritage

Storm over the Brokenback Ranges, Hunter Valley

As you know, I’m a big fan of non-mainstream wines such as tempranillo and barbera and fiano. So when a group of Hunter Valley grape growers and winemakers interested in moving beyond their local stalwarts, semillon and shiraz, invited me to address a seminar on alternative varieties, I leapt at the chance.

Unfortunately, before the seminar I sat down to a tasting of wines from the Hunter’s Heritage Vineyard Register - twenty utterly glorious bottle-aged single-site semillons and shirazes from the region’s oldest vines. It was awesome: the soul-satisfying complexity of the Tyrrells HVD and Meerea Park Terracotta semillons and the soil-drenched depth of the Drayton Joseph, Tulloch Hector and Mount Pleasant OP&OH shirazes all made the most deliciously compelling argument for classic grapes planted in classic Australian terroir. I left the tasting glowing with patriotic pride: these unique traditional wines are nothing short of national treasures.

Which is not, let me tell you, the best frame of mind in which to sit down to a seminar on alternative grapes. Sure, we tasted some very nice examples of Hunter-grown viognier (the Little Wine Co.), pinot grigio and barbera (David Hook) and tempranillo (Audrey Wilkinson). But I couldn’t get the beautiful, lingering taste of those old classic wines out of my mouth. Why, I kept wondering wistfully (and, unfortunately, out loud), when you already make semillon and shiraz so brilliantly why would you bother even trying to do anything else?

The answer, of course, is commercial reality.

The fact is that while traditional Hunter semillon and shiraz may well be wonderful drinks, they’re hard to sell, even in the Hunter - especially in the Hunter. Most of the millions of tourists who flock here aren’t after authentic, savoury wines of terroir: they’re after a nice savvy blanc or fruity red to knock back after a hard day’s golf. And as most of the region’s wineries rely on these tourists to survive, the pressure’s on to comply.

So of course winemakers should be exploring the alternatives. But it would be a tragedy to see traditional Hunter semillon and shiraz sidelined or even killed off by market forces, victims of the region’s own tourism success.

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This article first appeared in The Weekend Australian Magazine, Feb 6, 2010.