A note from Chief Winemaker – Xanthe Hatcher

There’s lots happening here at Audrey Wilkinson. Whilst many of you have been locked down at home, our winery and vineyard team have been on site ensuring that the wheels were still turning in the winery and in the vineyard.

The team have been using this time to prune our vineyard and get it in top condition for budburst which is just starting as I write. The recent rainfall that we have had has set the vines up for a really healthy start to vintage 2021.  In the winery we have been putting the finishing touches on some of our wines from the 2020 vintage.  In what was a very tricky vintage with drought and bush fires, it is so nice to have some wines in bottle that we can be proud of.

The 2020 Rosé has already been released and we have had some great feedback from our members.  I am also excited to be bottling our 2020 Gewürztraminer this week – it has all the trademark rose petal and lychee characters that we love about this wine, which I know is a favourite for many of our members and visitors.

We have also been blending our 2019 Winemakers Selection Shiraz and our 2019 Lake Shiraz, ready for bottling in a few months, these are two wines that show just how good the 2019 vintage was.  Keep an eye out for these – they are releasing soon and will be available in limited quantities.

We are very proud to announce another year of incredible results for Audrey Wilkinson in the 2020 James Halliday Wine Companion, acknowledging our long track record of excellence and consistently high scores.

In this definitive guide to Australian wine, not only did an impressive 12 of our wines score 86 and above, 3 received scores of 95-97 out of 100 and 9 of 12 our wines achieved points in the 90-97 category.

The 2020 honour roll is as follows;

Audrey Wilkinson ‘The Lake’ Shiraz – 97 points

Audrey Wilkinson ‘The Ridge’ Semillon 2018 – 96 points

Audrey Wilkinson Winemakers Selection Semillon 2018 – 95 points

Audrey Wilkinson Semillon 2018 – 93 points

Audrey Wilkinson ‘The Oakdale’ Chardonnay 2018 – 93 points

Audrey Wilkinson Winemakers Selection Chardonnay 2018 – 93 points

Audrey Wilkinson Winemakers Selection Malbec 2017 – 93 points

Audrey Wilkinson Winemakers Selection Tempranillo 2018 – 91 points

Audrey Wilkinson Hunter Valley Tempranillo 2018 – 90 points

Audrey Wilkinson Hunter Valley Chardonnay 2018 – 86 points

Audrey Wilkinson Hunter Valley Verdelho 2018 – 86 points

Audrey Wilkinson Pinot Noir 2018 – 86 points

The 2019 James Halliday results are in and we are proud to announce that our 2017 vintage and Museum wines have achieved some outstanding scores, including 5 wines with a score of 95+. Both our 2009 Museum and 2017 ‘The Ridge’ Semillons are also among the ‘Top-rated Semillons’.

Well done Chief Winemaker Jeff Byrne and our winemaking team on these fantastic results, and on producing quality wines year after year!

2017 Reserve ‘The Ridge’ Semillon – 96 points
2009 Reserve ‘The Ridge’ Semillon – 96 points
2017 Winemaker’s Selection Shiraz – 96 points
2017 Reserve ‘The Oakdale’ Chardonnay – 95 points
2017 Winemaker’s Selection Chardonnay (Hunter Valley) – 95 points
2017 Winemaker’s Selection Semillon – 94 points
2017 Audrey Wilkinson Semillon – 91 points
2017 Audrey Wilkinson Shiraz – 91 points
2017 Audrey Wilkinson Semillon Sauvignon Blanc – 90 points
2017 Audrey Wilkinson Tempranillo – 90 points

Our 2017 Winemakers Selection Shiraz was named as Huon Hooke’s Wine of the Week (AU) in this week’s The Real Review (August 15 2018), with a high score of 94 points.

An outstanding review for an outstanding drop.

“This is an excellent full-bodied Hunter shiraz with a bright cellaring future. Dark purple/red colour with floral and red fruit aromas, it’s full-bodied, rich and dense with firm structure and ample ripe tannins, the finish long and satisfying.”
Huon Hooke, The Real Review

The full review is available at: therealreview.com/2018/08/15/wine-of-the-week-au-181

Newcastle Herald wine writer John Lewis has reviewed two of our 2017 Shirazes – the 2017 Reserve ‘The Lake’ Shiraz and 2017 Audrey Wilkinson Shiraz, with each respectively scoring an impressive 5 stars and 4 stars.

Fantastic results from the Hunter Valley Wine Show, with our 2017 Winemakers Selection Semillon taking out the Ed Jouault Memorial Trophy for Best One-Year-Old Dry Semillon. We also won Gold medals for our 2017 Winemakers Selection Shiraz, 2017 Winemakers Selection Malbec and Museum release 2009 Reserve ‘The Ridge’ Semillon.

Great results for our 2017 vintage, and congratulations to Chief Winemaker Jeff Byrne and our winemaking team!

As the cooler weather sets in in and thoughts turn to comforting food, try this seasonal menu from the beautiful new illustrated book, Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen, by Annie Smithers. This recipe, recently featured in Halliday Magazine, is a perfect match for the Audrey Wilkinson Tempranillo, which is made between the Spanish Joven and Reserva styles.

Change is inevitable.

Recent events in world politics have reminded us of that fact with the unexpected outcomes of the Brexit vote and the US Presidential election.

Some changes are more welcome than others though. Of particular note for us at Audrey Wilkinson is the return to favour of Chardonnay – though for us true believers its popularity never dimmed!

I have made no secret that Chardonnay is my favourite variety and I know Jeff feels similarly. Since Jeff started with us 8 years ago we have pursed a singularly vibrant, crisp style of Chardonnay with its hallmark being the absence of malolactic fermentation and a light use of oak.

This more modern style has been well met, as we have seen our Audrey Series Chardonnay become our top selling wine in Australia and chardonnay become our number one export variety as well. To think that not so long ago if you were an “ABC” wine drinker, you wanted Anything But Chardonnay, but that the new term being bandied about is “NBC” – Nothing But Chardonnay!

In large part this growing resurgence of Chardonnay is a result of the fresher styles now being made, but also the introduction of newer chardonnay clones from Burgundy.

We have been keen to explore how these new clones might help further definition to our style and so, 3 years ago, we grafted over two blocks, totalling just over a hectare, to a few of these Burgundy clones commonly referred to as Bernard clones after the man responsible for their selection – Raymond Bernard.

We had reasonable expectations of the quality of grape we might see from this experiment, but were honestly blown away at how well the clones took and the high quality grape the vines then produced.

The first small crop went straight into the 2014 Winemakers Selection and the second year crop into the 2015 Oakdale.

Buoyed by this early success we grafted a further 2.5 hectares over last year and have just completed grafting over another 3.5 hectares this spring.

We won’t see any fruit from these latest changes for this vintage, but we do expect to hand pick a small crop last year’s grafting with full cropping coming in the year after.

Growing popularity has driven some other changes for us at Audrey’s. Many of you who have visited the Cellar Door on the weekend will know that over the past few years we have become exponentially busier. At times this has prevented us from serving the general public, let alone you our Club members, as well as we would have wished.

So, the time has come for us to take action in this regard and, commencing this summer, we shall be introducing a charge for all tastings at the Cellar Door as a way of both curtailing some of this activity, so as to allow us to offer a more refined tasting experience to all and to deliver more value to your membership.

To be clear, Wine Club Members will never be charged for a tasting!

I will send though shortly a separate note to you all detailing the specifics of the new tasting programmes we will be introducing and the added amenity they will bring for Club members (including a return to the Private Tasting room upstairs!), but if you have any questions on this please feel free to contact either myself or Michelle directly.

On behalf of the entire Agnew Wines family, may I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Yours Sincerely,

James Agnew
General Manager