Hunter Valley Semillon is arguably Australia’s most distinctive style – a pale silvery green liquid that smells of lemon, lime and a hint of petrol, with acidity that squeaks across your palate like a G-Funk West Coast whistle, leaving behind a faint buzzing and a whisper of toasty flavour. The buzzing mellows and the toast intensifies with age, but that pH still makes Chablis look flabby. And if that doesn’t sound delicious, you clearly didn’t grow up popping Warheads sour candy and listening to ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’.
In the land of great Hunter Valley Semillon there are two benchmark producers that every wine student should keep in their Rolodex. As Richard has already written a wine of the week on Tyrell’s, I’ll happily celebrate Brokenwood.
Brokenwood was established in 1970 by a trio of Sydney-based lawyers – Tony Albert, John Beeston and James Halliday – yes, that James Halliday. But after 13 hands-on years, Halliday sold his share of the winery in 1983 – the same year that Iain Riggs, the company’s new winemaker and managing director, made the winery’s first Semillon. It was Riggs who was ultimately responsible for determining the company’s Semillon style and moving production from predominately red wines to predominately white wines.
Today, Stuart Hordern and Kate Sturgess, pictured at the top of this article, make Brokenwood’s Semillons. The style remains virtually unchanged. As the Hunter Valley is a subtropical region with a warm, humid growing season, they harvest the grapes early to preserve acidity and avoid the worst of the summer rains – generally between late January and late February, when potential alcohol is around 10–11.5% abv.
Brokenwood crush their grapes upon arrival and run them through a must chiller before pressing in order to preserve the fruitier, aromatic citrus components. Then they clarify the must and ferment it in stainless steel at about 16–17 °C – again, to preserve more delicate aromas.
This particular cuvée – their entry-level bottling – is bottled in May, only four months after harvest, and released just a few months later. (The 2022 was available in the UK by January 2023 – when Alistair Cooper MW reviewed it.)
Despite their incredibly early release (which I recon has more to do with cash flow than readiness for drinking), these wines develop very slowly and so, if you can, it’s best to wait a few years before broaching. In the case of Brokenwood’s 2022 – which I acquired two years ago but is still available in shops in Australia, the US, the UK and the Netherlands – there’s less time to wait. I’d suggest it will enter its ideal drinking window in another year. It has only just started to develop that lovely tertiary smoky toastiness that bewilderingly develops in great Hunter Semillon with bottle age. If you choose to open it now – when it’s lightly grassy, brimming with lemon and lime – it can take the place of a lemon squeeze with oysters, sing with miến gà (a Vietnamese chicken noodle soup) and, please forgive me, make an absolutely brilliant kir.
For more Hunter Semillon options, see our wine-review database – and for more about this fascinating grape variety itself, check out the Oxford Companion to Wine entry.
