All roads seemingly lead to the Hunter Valley for RedtoBrown at the moment. Hunter Valley tastings, samples, and tweet-ups have been a focus in the past couple of weeks, and as it so happens I’m heading up to the Hunter this weekend for a mate’s wedding. Staying on message I thought I’d talk a bit about the 1994 Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz, which I had a few weeks back with Brown and our much better halves.
When a wine is 17 years old I’d generally err on the side of caution when considering whether to decant for a while before drinking. If you decant for too long with an aged wine you might in fact miss its best moments, before it starts to slowly decline. So this was given a quick decant before it found its way into our glasses. As it turned out, I shouldn’t have been so conservative, as this Hunter Shiraz has plenty of years in front of it, and I’m sure it would have been better on day two, had we not polished it off in the one evening.
The dominant aroma on the nose initially was some characteristic Hunter leather along with some chocolate oak. As it opened up over the next couple of hours however, notes of cherry, earth, and black olive came to the fore. A lovely aged Hunter bouquet. The palate was defined by a spine of quite prominent acidity from which everything else flowed. It’s medium-bodied, wonderfully food friendly, tastes of classic Hunter sour cherry and earth, and finishes with fine, drying tannin. It’s not incredibly complex, and I could quibble about oak being a tad too prominent here, but there’s an appeal and persistence to this wine that’s hard to resist. Cork permitting, it would not surprise me to see this still drinking well in another 10 years time. 4 Stars.
Rated: 
Website: www.mountpleasantwines.com.au
Red
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
1994 Mount Pleasant Maurice O'Shea Shiraz (Hunter Valley)
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4 comments:
Much agreed on the decanting old wines thing Red. It seems to me to be; 'do you, don't you, do you, don't you?'; just take it on the individual wine, sample immediately, and see how it goes from there, treading with caution of course :)
Cheers for the flick as well - I haven't seen that one before. One for the empty collection maybe mate? ;)
Cheers,
Chris P
I'm not actually much one for an empty bottle collection. I probably should though with more unique bottles like the 94 O'shea. Do you keep them?
Unfortunately, much to Beck's displeasure, I hold onto a few memorable ones :(
Recently I've come close to chucking some, if not all, out, which for the sake of sanity I probably should. :) After all, I'm not a restaurant, or Rockford's cellar door.
O'Shea peoples make fine wines
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