Well it’s going to go close, some have already said it is, and it’s certainly unrivalled for the mantle of Australia’s most unique sweet wine. Recently I was lucky enough to taste two of the few remaining bottles (and there can’t be many) of the McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant 1946/66 Sauternes.
That’s right, this is a blend of two wines from 20 years apart, and the story of how this came to be is partly a tale of Australian pragmatism and partly one of ingenuity.
The 1946 component of the wine represents around one-third of the blend. It’s a Hunter Valley muscadelle made by the late and much-idolized legend Maurice O’Shea. The majority 1966 component is gewürztraminer, also from the Hunter, made by Brian Walsh.
Walsh was O’Shea’s understudy in the Mount Pleasant winery and was also the winemaker that stepped into O’Shea’s shoes at Mount Pleasant when he died in 1956 at just 59 years of age.
O’Shea had famously created Mount Pleasant when, at just 24, he convinced his mother to purchase a suite of three properties in the Hunter Valley and started in on winemaking. McWilliams bought a 50 percent share of the venture in 1932 and the remaining 50 percent in 1941 but O’Shea stayed on as chief winemaker until his death.
O’Shea then went on to make several very famous Australian wines at Mount Pleasant, including this 1946 muscadelle, which won many trophies over its exhibiting career. But like all great wines, the glow started to fade.
I spoke to retired McWilliams chief winemaker, Phil Ryan, who was a steward at the Sydney Wine Show in 1968 and recalls the outspoken, bon vivant, art dealer and wine judge, Rudy Komon, demanding, “Where’s that McWilliams ’46?” as he tasted the sweet wine class. Once he found it, and having seen it looking better over many years prior, he awarded it a silver medal, declaring an era had come to an end.
Back at McWilliams bottling facility in Pyrmont (inner-city Sydney), Bruce Tyson, who was the technical manager in charge of putting the show wines together, was about to bottle the 1966 Sauternes made form gewürztraminer.
Having had Komon’s wine show verdict on the old 1946 passed on to him, he looked at putting some of the young 1966 Sauternes across to the old ’46 to see how well it freshened it up and, as history has confirmed, it worked pretty bloody well.
It livened the wine up beautifully but there was an essence of mature wine there too. So they de-corked the remaining 1946 Sauternes on the second floor in Pyrmont, just outside Bruce Tyson’s lab, blended it with two-thirds of the 1966 and bottled the new 1946/66 wine.
This then gave McWilliams a show wine that met the minimum stock requirements to keep entering it in the show, where it kept winning accolades for some time. Only a small amount was bottled, anecdotally two to three hundred dozen, and it was finally released in the mid-to-late 1980s as a mature wine.
The bottles I tried came from the McWilliams museum and, whilst fully mature and now deeply amber coloured, the wine still held freshness and aromatic perfume. It tasted very pure, lusciously textured and showed rich creamed caramel, toffee, burnt butter and honey. Still fresh through to the finish, the glossy texture held a glimmer of all that had gone before it, right back to the original 1946 muscadelle, made some 68 years ago. Unforgettable and, you’d have to say, unrepeatable blending genius! This wine underscores the undeniably rich history of Australian winemaking.
Nick Stock is a renowned Australian wine writer, author, presenter and filmmaker who reports on his worldwide wine tasting experiences for JamesSuckling.com.
