Australia's oldest wine region, two hours north, making a style of Semillon that exists nowhere else.
Vines were planted in the Hunter in the 1820s, which makes it the oldest wine region in Australia and one of the oldest in the New World. It is about 160 kilometres north of Sydney, inland from Newcastle.
By any conventional measure it should not work. It is subtropical, humid, and it rains at harvest. What it produces anyway is one of the world’s genuinely distinctive wine styles.
Hunter Semillon
Picked early at low sugar, made without oak, and bottled at around 10 to 11 per cent alcohol. Young, it is thin, neutral and rather unrewarding.
Left for eight to fifteen years, it develops into something extraordinary — honey, toast, lanolin and lime, with high acid — while remaining low in alcohol.
There is no other region making this. Tyrrell’s Vat 1, Brokenwood ILR and McWilliam’s Lovedale are the benchmarks, and cellar doors will usually pour a young and an aged example side by side, which is the single most instructive tasting available in Australian wine.
Hunter Shiraz
Medium-bodied, earthy, savoury and much lighter than Barossa Shiraz — sometimes described, not unreasonably, as the closest thing Australia makes to northern Rhône. It also ages very well.
The cellar doors
Around 150 in the Pokolbin, Broke and Lovedale areas. Most charge a small tasting fee, often waived on purchase.
The established names — Tyrrell’s, Brokenwood, Tulloch, McGuigan, Audrey Wilkinson for the view, Mount Pleasant — sit alongside a great many small producers.
Several are open only at weekends or by appointment. Check before driving out.
Getting there without driving
Organised tours from Sydney run daily — a coach, four or five cellar doors and lunch. Efficient and impersonal.
Private drivers and small-group tours cost more and let you choose.
Staying overnight is the best answer. There is a great deal of accommodation in Pokolbin, and it turns a rushed day into a proper visit — with dinner, which the region does well.
Train to Newcastle and a hire car from there also works if someone is not drinking.
The rest of it
Hot air ballooning at dawn over the vines. Hunter Valley Gardens, sixty acres of themed gardens, popular with families and lit at Christmas. Golf. Cheese, chocolate and olive producers along the same roads.
Concerts — several wineries host large outdoor gigs in summer, which fills accommodation months ahead.
Practicalities
The drive is about two hours via the M1. Roads within the region are rural and unlit.
0.05 blood alcohol is the limit and random breath testing is routine. Spitting at tastings is normal and nobody will think anything of it.
