It hasn’t quite nudged midday when I’m sipping chardonnay and eating homegrown olives pickled in fennel while looking out over the vines. The sunsets here are said to be spectacular, with the light illuminating the dramatic sandstone escarpment.
THERE ARE CERTAIN POINTS during a trip to the Hunter Valley that make you feel like you’ve stepped straight into a Frederick McCubbin painting. The Australian impressionist captured in brushstrokes an early Australian pastoral ideal in all its tawny shades of green and burnished golds offset by a blue sky or a marbled sunset. And despite being Australia’s most popular wine region, just over two hours from Sydney and an even quicker skip down the road from Newcastle, the Hunter still serves up these vistas in abundance and quick succession: revealed once you round a bend en route from one winery to another, kangaroos grazing in the grasses in your periphery.
Traditional Lands of the Wonnarua people and encompassing 2605 hectares of vineyards, the Hunter is a patchwork of smaller subregions each with its own nuances in terms of wine characteristics. I join a gathering at Carillion Wines at Tallavera Grove to celebrate the 16th annual Hunter Valley Legends Awards, which recognises the region’s past, present and future. Here in Mount View, in what has poetically been described as the dress circle of the Hunter Valley, vines grow on terra rossa soils derived from underlying limestone that you’d more readily associate with South Australia’s Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon than in a
