The Wine Hunter: The Life Story of Australia’s First Great Winemaker

THE WINE HUNTER

THE LIFE STORY OF AUSTRALIA’S FIRST GREAT WINEMAKER

MAURICE O’SHEA

BY CAMPBELL MATTINSON

First published in 2007 as a trade paperback by Hachette Australia.

Revised and updated in 2015.

E-book published by Campbell Mattinson via BookBaby 2015.

US edition printed by Create Space 2015.

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Copyright © Campbell Mattinson, 2007.

Copyright © Campbell Mattinson, 2015.

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THE WINE HUNTER

Mattinson, Campbell, 1968–

Cover photograph by Max Dupain, licensed through the National Library of Australia.

Cover design based on a concept by Mufti Hakiki.

Internal images by Max Dupain and McWilliam’s Wines.

Images otherwise supplied courtesy of McWilliam’s Wines.

Australia’s first great winemaker was a Frenchman. He walked onto a hillside vineyard in the Hunter Valley north-west of Sydney in the early 1920s and in a hot, soggy climate worked to craft a set of wines that, when finally opened as fifty- and sixty-year-olds, could make people gasp. He made these wines without electricity, without any kind of personal or professional convenience, and with a broken heart. It makes no sense that these wines should prove so good; what he managed was a miracle. He died without knowing of the legend he and his wines would become.

This is the story of Maurice O’Shea, creator of Australia’s first fine wines.

Reviews for The Wine Hunter

James Halliday, The Weekend Australian: One of the most remarkable wine books to come my way … It will capture anyone who reads it: this is not a wine geek book but an epic.

Max Allen, The Australian Magazine: This is the best book on wine to be published in Australia for many, many years.

Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, The Wine Advocate: Loved The Wine Hunter. A must-read for lovers of Aussie wine.

Jancis Robinson, jancisrobinson.com: Campbell Mattinson is arguably Australia’s most literate, and certainly most literary, wine writer. I ... admire his monograph on the Hunter Valley pioneer Maurice O’Shea immensely.

Jeni Port, The Melbourne Age: Wine Hunter is a breakthrough wine book: an astonishing, cerebral, emotional entanglement of fact and dramatisation, of tender detail and beautiful, expressive words. Has there ever been a wine book written quite this way?

Paddy Kendlar, Herald-Sun: I started reading a wine book last weekend and finished it on the Sunday night. Literally couldn’t put it down, except to take a break when the story became somewhat sad … It’s a wonderful story with a perception and sensitivity almost matching that of the subject. The few O’Shea wines that I have tasted – made under the McWilliams Mount Pleasant label – were more than forty years old at the time. They were magnificent. Campbell Mattinson has captured the essence of a great Australian artist. I heartily commend this remarkable book.

Gary Walsh, Winorama: I started reading it this morning and finally put the book down late in the afternoon. Finished. It’s really quite brilliant. A captivating, compelling and very moving read written in the unique Mattinson style. A beautiful story first, and a wine book second. I think it has universal appeal.

Grant Dodd, thewiningpro.com: This is a genuine call to those of you that love wine and/or love great writing to go out and buy The Wine Hunter, by Campbell Mattinson, one of the most inspired pieces of writing in any genre by an Austalian writer for some time. A biopic of sorts on the life of the great but underappreciated Hunter Valley winemaker Maurice O’Shea, The Wine Hunter is a beautifully written, emotive story that somehow infiltrates the ghost of O’Shea and brings his undeniable genius to life. It is a great read, and it deserves to be read.

About the author

Campbell Mattinson is the editor and chief writer of James Halliday’s Wine Companion Magazine, is a reviewer for the best-selling annual Wine Companion book, is the Australian correspondent for Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Guide, and since 2002 has been the publisher of Australia’s most active wine site winefront.com.au. He was the winner of the 1996 Best Australian Sports Writing Award, the 1995 Independent Young Writer of the Year Award, and has twice been named the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year (2005 and 2007).

For Simone Bryce, daughter of Maurice O’Shea.

Halliday’s Last O’Shea

I’M GOING to start at the end.

When wine guru James Halliday asked if I’d join him for dinner to share his last bottle of Maurice O’Shea shiraz it was suddenly as if many different dreams had crashed and exploded within me. The idea that James Halliday might invite me to share a treasured bottle of rare wine is enough to blow a fuse in itself, but as I wrote this book I developed an affection for winemaker Maurice O’Shea that is difficult to explain. He died immediately after vintage, in 1956, a dozen years before I was born but the longer I’d spent trying to imagine my way into his head the more my admiration and respect for him grew. He was the one. He lit the flame. He refused to compromise on the essential beauty of wine when everything suggested that he should; his story was central to the soul of wine.

It follows then, in a strange kind of way, that as a lover of wine and of Australian wine I’d come to think of Maurice O’Shea as the best mate I never met. He made wine, great wine, wine that could be enjoyed for decades beyond its summer in the sun. Drinking this wine was like spending time with him; like meeting him. This is what James Halliday was offering.

Those summers: on a hillside in the Hunter Valley, a long way from anywhere, O’Shea made a succession of wines that now stand as beacons of just how glorious, and age-worthy, Australian wine can be. He did this without electricity (he rode to the Peters ice-cream factory in Newcastle to gather blocks of ice so often that they gave him his own key) or encouragement. He made great Australian shiraz, shiraz-pinot blends and semillon at a time when everyone was drinking, if they were drinking wine of any kind, port that had been fortified with brandy. His winery – Mount Pleasant in the Hunter Valley – never turned a profit in the whole time he was alone out there, which was upwards of thirty years. And yet long after he is gone the legend of his wines (at fifty, sixty and now even at seventy years-of-age) shows no sign of dying. Indeed, the legend grows apace. The short summary of this journey is simple: Maurice O’Shea and his wines turned out far better than anyone thought he or they could, or should. He and his wines are some kind of miracle.

Max Schubert, who came after O’Shea and went on to create Australia’s most famous wine, Penfolds Grange, once said that he felt ‘humble in the presence’ of the O’Shea wines. ‘The wines he left behind have spoken to me on many occasions,’ Schubert said before he died, ‘not only for their all round excellence, but for their amazing longevity. [His wines] did so much to convince us who followed him that it was possible to make an internationally competitive Australian table wine.’

Which might raise the question: would Penfolds Grange have ever come to be, had it not been for the inspiration of O’Shea and the beautiful wines he crafted?

The problem with the O’Shea wines now is, of course, that they’re so bloody rare. He only ever made small batches of them – during the Second World War he packaged some of his wines in recycled soft drink bottles, so limited were his resources – and when his wines were released, there wasn’t much encouragement to hold on to them. Most saw the back of a happy drinker’s throat many decades ago. In the eighteen months I spent working on this O’Shea story, I probably shared six bottles made by him; two of which transformed my perception of Australian and Hunter Valley wine. This makes me a very lucky man, though any amount is never enough and it left me craving more. Given this, the generosity of Halliday’s gesture – dinner, and his last bottle of an O’Shea red – felt as enormous as a hand to a falling man.

And besides, Halliday’s last bottle – kept in his private cellar for god knows how long – was called Mount Pleasant Mount Henry Light Dry Red 1944. That is, it wasn’t just Any Old O’Shea red wine. It was one of the wines from which his legend has grown.

It’s generally agreed that this wine was called Mount Henry in honour of O’Shea’s best friend, Henri Renault, a French-Australian wool buyer and chef from Sydney. O’Shea’s father was Irish-Australian but his mother, Leontine Beaucher, grew up in France before travelling with her father to Australia, in search of gold. There she met and married John Augustus O’Shea in Sydney. One of their sons, Maurice, eventually created a golden history for Australian wine. The birth of fine Australian table wine therefore stems directly from a French heritage, and mother, and sensibility.

On the night we would drink this old red, Halliday carried the bottle of 1944 shiraz in his hands – keeping it upright so as not to disturb the crusty sediment at the bottom – as we sat in a small plane on route from Melbourne to the rural town of Mildura. You don’t trust bottles like this to the luggage compartment. The historic Grand Hotel at Mildura boasts an underground dining room and, in the private sitting area of Stefano’s Restaurant, it feels as though you’re sitting in a cellar. It’s not ornate. At other tables Italians argue over citrus and water and wine. It could be 1944 in there.

Before we arrived, Chef Stefano de Pieri took a whole piglet and roasted it for four hours. When he eventually served it he said, ‘I cooked it for fifteen minutes too long.’ A perfectionist’s sad refrain. I put my fork to the meat and it melted away. Halliday went back for thirds. ‘I’ve just come back from Spain,’ he said, ‘and boy does this stack up.’ The pork proves the perfect match to the wine.

A Mildura reporter, tipped off that something special was about to happen at our table, bustled in, ‘What would that old bottle be worth?’ The opening of some wine bottles is news in itself.

Halliday looked at me, as if I’m the O’Shea expert. The mantle doesn’t sit comfortably – I wish I knew so much more about him. I adore Maurice and – if it’s possible of someone you’ve never met – I miss the bugger.

‘Well,’ I said to the reporter. ‘A 1954 O’Shea red sold for about $3000 at auction a few weeks ago, including commission.’

I know this because, the day after the auction, I received the following (rather extraordinary) email from someone mid-way through reading this very O’Shea biography. The email read:

I spotted a bottle of McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant Robert Hermitage 1954 in the Langton’s Melbourne auction that closed today (lot 1771). The estimate on the 1954 seemed low to me ($450–$550), so I left a bid of $950, then upped it to $1250 to be sure. I got so emotionally involved in your book The Wine Hunter that I later upped that bid to $2550. I woke up this morning to see that it sold for $2778, and sadly not to me. My communion with O’Shea will have to wait for another chance. I know that wait might not be a short one.

‘So,’ I said to the reporter, ‘this 1944 Mount Henry might be worth $3000 to $4000?’ I looked at Halliday. I’ve not convinced him.

Emphatically, he interjected: ‘But the ’44 was always a much greater wine. Much greater.’

The reporter leaves. There are six of us at the table now. Wine writer Peter Forrestal is there too; 1944’s his birth year. Halliday slides two slithers of metal down each side of the cork, and slowly extracts it in one piece; the cork would probably crumble at the hands of a corkscrew. He then lines up the glasses and pours the contents of the bottle in a single pour, across all six glasses – individual pours would cause the bottle to tip up and down, stirring the sediment. This is a 65-year-old wine. It would be easy to shake its bones loose. Careful, careful.

I think about the wine itself: Mount Henry Light Dry Red 1944. It was made on a remote, hot, humid hill just after O’Shea’s marriage crumbled. Just before the long, lonely stretch began, the stretch that defines his winemaking life. It was sold in a flat-bottomed bottle, with no punt. There is no alcohol reading on the label and the address is listed as Newcastle – where Mount Pleasant had offices at the time. The wine is 100 per cent pure Hunter Valley.

Before I taste it, I find that I’m shaking. I’ve looked forward to this moment for so long, and when it’s gone I may never have another like it. There is a good chance, of course, that despite the wine’s worth it will taste terrible; sixty-five years is an extraordinarily long time for any cork to hold up, let alone the wine itself.

And then I take a sip.

In its dotage, regardless of everything that is different in the world between then and now, it is immediately apparent that this wine is more kaleidoscopically beautiful than it was, likely, when it was young and O’Shea was still doing what he did, battling away on that hillside. As an old wine it is not simply ‘alive’, or drinkable, and therefore magical by default. Many old wines can be belittled in this way; this Mount Henry Shiraz cannot.

In April 1996, Halliday opened another bottle of this same wine. He wrote of it then:

Full brick-red; an amazingly fragrant bouquet, with layer upon layer of aromas which unfolded to reveal cedar, cigar box, dark cherry and a trace of regional earth and tar. Literally flooded the mouth with its voluptuous sweetness, silky, long and lingering, with that sweetness carrying right through the mid to back palate. The quintessence of all that is great in the Hunter Valley. Once again, there has to have been some pinot in this wine.

The late David Wynn – the modern founder of Wynns Coonawarra Estate – once said of Maurice O’Shea: ‘His Mount Pleasant wines were acknowledged as the best in Australia. Not only were his wines outstandingly good, but at that stage [the 1930s] Mount Pleasant was the only top-quality wine in Australia. He established the standards for the Australian wine industry.’

The late Len Evans (who went to his grave having safely consumed his last bottles of O’Shea’s reds; there were never any flies on Evans) hardly disagreed. ‘Let me put it this way,’ Evans said shortly before he died, ‘I’ve had more enjoyment out of the old O’Shea wines than I have had out of old Grange – and I don’t mean anything against Grange. The O’Shea wines simply give me more drinking pleasure.’

Hunter Valley legend, the late Max Lake, said more simply, ‘O’Shea did things in impossible conditions, and none of it has since been surpassed.’

On a Wednesday night, in a Mildura cellar, I once again lift my glass of this beautiful old O’Shea red to my mouth. It has no right to be this good – this is the voice of a distant generation, when things were different. But with each sip, a shiver goes tumbling down my spine. It makes my glass tremble, and my lips too.

The wine is sweet and perfumed and aflame with life. It smells of old knickers and wood palings, earth and sordid sheets. It smells, remarkably, of sweet summer berries. It smells of old musk lipstick and of a well-oiled baseball bat and of all manner of useless things that we are wont to treasure. Blast it, it smells short on regret and high on life – now and then and forever.

Most of us will agree on one thing. A lot of what’s said or written about wine is, at best, nonsense. As someone who makes a living from writing about wine, I stand guilty as charged; I often wonder why so many of us fuss over wine so much, why so many of us care. Surely there’s something better we could all be doing with our lives.

But then, this. An old wine by an old champion, carefully tended and resurrected. One final moment beneath the lights, after all these years. Carried and rested and resisted over twenty-three thousand, seven hundred and twenty-five-odd nights. A group of eager folks. Food, lovingly prepared, spread on the table. Generosity. Generations mingling. And this is surely the point: the mundane is often, and frankly, not bearable without this ‘extra’ of life.

And indeed, as I supped and savoured the old shiraz, I started to think that – in our own time of turmoil, when many of Australia’s wine producers contemplate selling up, as vineyards all over the country go unwanted or unpicked, as people wonder exactly how good or competitive our wine is – Australian wine, to those who love it, is more than an affection; it is a responsibility.

Such is the joy, gravity and power an old bottle of wine can inspire.

An old bottle made by the man who changed Australian wine. Indeed, Australia’s first great winemaker. The one and only. Maurice O’Shea.

This is Maurice’s story.

The beginning of a wine valley

‘Wine is a man inside a darkened cask.’

– Geoffrey Lehmann, A Poem for Maurice O’Shea

THEY CAME. Like mad folk. With bulls and bullocks and angry steers, with seed in their packs and hard jumping wood as their seats. Desperate, they rattled and battled and hummed out of Sydney. Slogged up through St Albans. Then made for the ranges, the path they cut like an etch in the dirt, a homage to hope. After a day or two or a week they came to a valley too far away, a slog through mud and cold and, if they got their timing wrong, such peculiar heat that their shirts burned to their shoulders. Almost everyone, sooner or later, would be wiped out. The frost or the rot or the wet or the heat. Or just the plaintive quiet isolation of it. The Hunter Valley. The year 1830. Farming to the sound of a quiet roar, no one real sure what the valley could make. Or grow. Or sustain.

Or do.

The eerie sway of a cedarwood forest. The ground pregnant with coal – conceived but not yet raised. The just-sown crops burned or flooded or dead. A big wide unforgiving valley with blue gums and the sharp smell of peppermint – a convict on the run, a bottle of full-proof rum stuck deep in his trouser pocket. Track him down. Shoot him. Then fetch up drinks all around. But not that hard-boiled rum, not the rum economy – the bad ways. All this slog and travel and isolation has to be for something. Better. A new way. A land out there a day or two or a week from Sydney, a place to sober up and stretch out the chance at freedom.

A place for vines – little plants with big floppy leaves that you prune like bonsai and hope for great big belly-fulls of fruit, grapes, black or red or white.

And they do. The people die and the bush burns and their crops fail, but they do plant vines, and the grapes come. It’s some kind of miracle. They plant more. Like folk possessed. All kinds. Grapes best for sweet wines and grapes best for dry; big grapes and small grapes and black grapes formed in such tiny clusters that they look like a swarm of beetles, all puffy and purple and pippy. It’s not enough.

They need more.

Hundreds of different vines, always more, always searching for the best variety for their peculiar place, their slope, the sun they receive, the wet. They get vines in from France and vines in from Luxembourg, a small amount from Spain and some from the dreaded cold of England. They get vines in that no one can tell or remember much where they came from, and yet other vines with such hope hoisted on their leaves that you’d think that the names of the famous French châteaux they’d been cut from were engraved on their trunks. Most of the vines die – on the boat to Australia, on the dock, at the Governor’s in Sydney, or during the dry blazing week they’re finally planted in the red soil or the sandy soil or the grey clay soil of the Hunter.

But enough survive. And enough mad-possessed folk stay. And no one really knows exactly what they should be planting and growing and turning into wine, because there are thousands of different grape varieties and they are all snaking their way into the Hunter Valley by hook or by crook. But enough folk stick and enough wine is made and the coal starts coming up out of the ground and then it’s on for young and old, a boom on the Hunter River just inland from Newcastle, a time in the late 1830s and 1840s when folk started to think, by crikey, that they might be able to stay out there all that long travelling way from Sydney. There might be a future in it.

A statistic to make your eyes pop: there were a measly 20 acres of vines in the Hunter Valley in 1835. But by 1850, there were 500 acres of vines – a 25-fold increase in 15 years, all of it planted by hand and horse and hard work – and by 1866 there were at least a thousand acres, maybe five times that, maybe a grand wide arc of blooming green vines with dirt trails criss-crossing them and grapes warming and sweetening in the sun. The records of just how many vines there were vary wildly, as if everyone lost count. The stumbling bolting pioneering rush of it.

Whatever the case – it was gangbusters out there in that valley. Not just wealthy squatting land-lords. But thirty-two different families, vines in their dirt, grapes on their mind. Fields of green and fields of brown and all of it hand-hungry work.

Thirty-two families bumbling, stumbling, squeezing the watery sugary sticky juice out of grapes, and turning it into wine – or something resembling it. What’s this wine stuff supposed to taste like anyway?

And then there’s a railway line put in from Newcastle to Maitland and it’s the mid 1850s and it feels like the city or the nearest thing to it has suddenly come to the Hunter. The folk out there think it’s mad and great and an overwhelming opportunity, and they boast that this place a few days or a week from Sydney is going to happen. If they can survive it. If they can just bloody survive it.

And that’s a lot easier to say than it is to do.

Even with the paddle-steamer churning up the river, carting crops to Newcastle, keeping that spanking new train honest. Even with the land grants and the chance to bear a family. Even with the burning and the clearing and the chopping, the bushland cracking open and the wood-smoke hanging tough, weighed and wilting in the soggy, humid air.

The vines aren’t carrots or potatoes or wheat. They’re a kind of tree and a tree needs time – at least two years but sometimes three or four or five good years after you’ve planted it before it even sets its first fruit. Longer if the seasons are bad. Tough it out. Toil the soil. If the hail comes at the wrong time a whole year’s worth of grapes can be lost; if the hail’s bad enough, the best part of two.

But still they make wine and drink wine and it’s a way of farming out there that starts to roll on. The storms and the heat and the wet