-
Producer
Tyrrell’s -
Region
Hunter Valley
-
RRP
$150
-
Vintage
2013
-
Variety/Varieties
Semillon
-
Alc./Vol.
11.5%
Lemon curd, honeyed toast and toasted cashews, with a citrus zing that hasn’t gone anywhere despite over a decade in the bottle. No oak was used to get here — just time. Delicious, and still just getting started.
Tyrrell’s is one of Australia’s oldest family-owned wineries, making wine in the Hunter Valley since 1858. Their Winemaker’s Selection range dates back to 1965, when Murray Tyrrell, working with the legendary Len Evans, set out to identify the very best wines from each vintage and name them after the casks they matured in. Vat 1 Semillon has been made under that banner for well over sixty years, a wine only bottled in years the family believes meets the mark. Visit the Hunter and Tyrrell’s cellar door is a genuine pilgrimage — the original 1850s ironbark slab hut and 1860s dirt-floored winery still stand on site.
This 2013 release comes predominantly from Tyrrell’s Short Flat Vineyard, alongside a small parcel from neighbouring DeBeyers, both sitting on sandy, free-draining soil along the same creek bed — vines grown on their own roots, dry-farmed, with the oldest material dating back to 1923. Short Flat has been a multiple-time finalist in our own Vineyard of the Year Awards, and it’s easy to see why: that pale, free-draining sandy loam is exactly what Hunter semillon vines love, keeping the vines from waterlogging while retaining just enough moisture through the dry growing season to produce fruit of vibrant natural acidity and fine citrus character.
The winemaking itself is almost defiantly simple. Fruit is hand-picked, fermented cool, and spends minimal time on lees before an early bottling designed purely to lock in freshness — no oak fermentation, no oak maturation, nothing to get in the way of the fruit. It’s a style built on restraint, and it’s precisely that restraint which allows bottle age to do the real work: over years in the cellar, this wine slowly develops the toasty, honeyed complexity it could never get from a barrel, while somehow staying bright and youthful in structure the whole way through.
This is the whole magic trick of Hunter semillon. Young, it can be almost searingly acidic — electric, tooth-achingly tart, and picked deliberately early, which keeps alcohol low and preserves that natural acid line. It’s exactly that acidity that acts as the wine’s insurance policy, allowing it to hold together and slowly transform over years, even decades, in the bottle. As the acid gradually softens and mellows, the wine’s primary lemon and citrus character evolves into something richer and more complex — honey, buttered toast, marmalade, toasted nuts — all without a day spent in oak. It’s a style unlike almost anything else in the world of white wine, and this 2013 sits right in the sweet spot of that evolution.
Tasting note
Thirteen years in and this is textbook aged Hunter semillon, fully in its stride. Toasted cashew, honey drizzled over buttered toast, lemon zest and fine-cut lime marmalade sit alongside lemon curd eaten straight from the jar, with a faint whisper of fresh-mown hay and the barest hint of two-stroke mower petrol — that classic developed Semillon signature. Faint whiffs of preserved lemon and orange oil give way to oyster brine and freshly zested lime, each layer peeling back to reveal another underneath. Age has filled out the frame a little, added flesh to the bones, but the wine remains bracingly fresh and relatively light-bodied, moving like quicksilver across the tongue. Lilts of caramel and toasted almond nod to over a decade of bottle development, while the finish just keeps extending, long and mouth-watering, with acid still doing all the work it needs to. This is a wine still very much on the way up, with the fruit profile of something a fraction of its age and decades of cellaring still ahead of it.
When to drink
This is a serious wine, so use its powers wisely. Take it to a BYO dinner to quietly flex on your wine-collecting mates, or bring it round to the in-laws’ place when you feel like impressing. It’s got the firepower for a proper fish dish — think whole baked flounder drowned in burnt butter and capers, or sole meunière — but it’ll do just as good a job on classic fish and chips if that’s more your speed. Or skip the occasion altogether: crack it on the couch with a bag of crisps and let the wine do the entertaining. A wine like this creates its own event either way.
Themes of this wine
Semillon
Semillon is a chameleon of a grape, capable of everything from crisp, unoaked dry whites to lusciously botrytised sweet wines, and blended with sauvignon blanc across Bordeaux’s dry and sweet styles alike. In Australia its most singular expression is unoaked Hunter Valley semillon — picked early at low sugar and correspondingly low alcohol, bone dry and almost neutral in youth, before slowly unfurling with bottle age into something toasty, honeyed and richly complex. Few white wine styles anywhere in the world transform so dramatically, or so reliably, over decades in the cellar.
Hunter Valley
The Hunter Valley, just north of Sydney, is one of Australia’s oldest and most historic wine regions, home to family wineries with roots stretching back to the mid-1800s. Its warm, humid climate is an unlikely home for fine white wine, yet it’s produced exactly that in semillon — a grape that thrives here precisely because it’s picked well before the heat and humidity can cause problems, retaining natural acidity that carries it through decades of ageing. Shiraz is the region’s other calling card, typically medium-bodied and earthy rather than powerful, a reflection of the same climate that shapes the whites.
Aged wine
Bottle age transforms wine through a slow alchemy: tannins soften and clump together, colour shifts and mellows, and gradual, minute exposure to oxygen reshapes aromas and flavours, trading primary fruit for deeper notes of honey, toast, dried herbs and earth that only time can build. A museum release, like this one, offers a shortcut into that world for anyone without the patience, space or discipline to cellar wine themselves — the producer has done the waiting for you, holding back a small parcel and releasing it only once it’s reached a point worth drinking. Semillon is one of the great case studies in what that patience can deliver.
Explore Further
GET FIRST ACCESS TO THE NEXT WINE ICONS – DELIVERED
Find out moreEach month, get 3 bottles of our freshest discoveries. We taste thousands to bring you the best.
Join us and support emerging winemakers, sustainable vineyards, and the development of young professionals.
— Max Allen, Wine Writer
— Broadsheet
— The Australian
