Why Elizabeth Semillion is suddely cheaper

G

Graeme Gee

Graeme Gee
From today's Sydney Morning Herald:

The move to screwcaps at the venerable Hunter Valley winery Mc Williams Mount Pleasant has had unforeseen side-effects. Mount Pleasants most famous product, Elizabeth Semillon, is five years old on release and, like other wineries that sell aged Hunter Semillon, Mount Pleasant routinely ran the five year old bottles past bright lights to see which ones had darkened in colour, in order to eliminate oxidised or prematurely aged bottles. Between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of every vintage was thrown out. Now, with screwcaps, each bottle matures at much the same rate and the variations are no longer seen...
Now Elizabeth has moved to a screwcap with the 2004 vintage, McWilliams suddenly has to sell more...

I've had the 2004, and it's a lovely drink. A thundering 10.5%, and developing nicely. Won't be a long ager but for the next 5 years ought to provide terrific drinking. Available around the traps for A$10-12.
cheers,
Graeme
 
Yikes, that's a disturbing failure rate. Glad to see they're using screwcaps now.

And yes, that's a lovely drink. Had the '03 a few months ago and it was lovely. Although these days most of my Semillon fix is coming from Tulloch - opened their 08 two nights ago, great stuff (at only 10%!)
 
The problem is that the good Oz semillons don't make it over here. McvWilliams doesn't deign to ship over the Elizabeth or Mt Pleasant because the Gallo people don't think there's a market for anything that might require some patience before it comes around. There are some Barossa semillons that appear (Torbreck's Woodcutter's semillon is obviously the house white around here, but others pass through from time to time) and other than the mass market,
 
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