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Winepros has a new wine, food and travel partner at VisitVineyards.com.Visit Vineyards brings you up-to-date wine, food and travel information in all regions around Australia, with independent recommendations and expert reviews, video interviews with winemakers, and more. Find what and where you want, how to get there and where to eat and stay, quickly and easily - their full service is opening very soon, but you can check the site out now. All wineries and vineyards listed in Winepros (and lots more - over 3000 and counting) have their current updated details on VisitVineyards.com, linked to nearby restaurants, food makers, growers, provedores, markets, over 15,000 bookable accommodations, plus galleries, golf and other activities that we think you may enjoy. Read more about Visit Vineyards here.
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ARTICLES |
Home : Articles |
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Feature Articles |  |  Wine Hunter; The Story of Maurice O'Shea, the Greatest Vigneron in Australia
This is one of the best books on wine you will find anywhere in the world - because it's not just wine facts. It's a genuine story: full of life, emotion, dedication, passion, and all things that make great books and great wine - and a true one at that.
In what surely should be ranked as one of the best biographies to be recently published in Australia, Campbell Mattinson paints a moving and lyrical picture of pioneering life in what was then 'outback' NSW - the Hunter Valley. It is also a story with one man's obsession with making great wines, of proving to himself and the world that this could be done, in what was then the untested terroir of Australia.
Maurice O'Shea, half Irish, half French, combined the doggedness of the former with the refinement of the latter, to wrest great wines out of these unproven soils, wines that would be drunk and revered long after his life ended. He was perhaps the maker of the first true Australian wine icons. Even more remarkable was that these wines were made by hand, with no modern assistance, like electricity, refrigeration, mechanical presses or stainless steel, and for a market whose palate was yet to be educated.
But this mission came at a cost, to himself and to his family, and tragedy was to haunt O'Shea more than once in his life. With this book, Campbell Mattinson not only spotlights Maurice O'Shea amongst the greats of Australian winemaking, but reveals himself to be a great Australian author, with a sensitivity to his subject - and to wine - that few other writers have matched.
All Winepros subscribers can buy your copy here now, at a special subscribers' only price of A$ 31.46 (RRP $35.95). Subscribing is FREE and takes only a minute.
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If you have changed your e-mail address, please resubscribe using your new address and current contact details. Then simply fill in the book order form on the following page. Easy!
Your payment will be processed and your copy of the book will be posted by Seekbooks, Australia's largest online bookshop. (Postage within Australia is A$6.95 for first copy, additional copies free). Order one now for Father's Day, or have one sent as a gift. Can be posted overseas.
Barossa Valley
Once upon a time it was fashionable to declare that the Barossa Valley had lost its way.
Treasures from the Victorian Alps to Margaret River
A range of lesser known wines to treasure and cellar.W hat a range of terroirs we have in Australia!
Ageing California wines
Bruce Cass discovers that when it comes to laying down California wines, big is not always better.
South Africa
Since the holding of the Shield Wine Challenge in 1995, South African winemakers and viticulturists have come to Australia in their droves to find out what we are doing right and they are doing wrong.
Granite goes gold!
Local vignerons, Gordon, Heather and Llew Knight, from the Macedon Ranges Knight Granite Hills winery, have a reason to celebrate this month.
Coonawarra - King of Cabernet
Not even the most parochial vigneron from outside Coonawarra would dispute the entitlement of that region to be regarded as Australia's foremost producer of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Wine and health: France awakens.
It is extraordinary that France, which for the past thousand years has been the most important wine producing country in the world, should be so negative about wine.
It's gold, gold, gold for Orange - now that's cool
It has to be serendipity on a major scale when a new, small winery enters a new wine show and walks away with seven of eight of the trophies awarded, the eighth being awarded to Rosemount Estate.
New Zealand Pinots
Australian-born and trained Larry McKenna has lived and worked in New Zealand for the past 20 years.
No great old wines, only great old bottles
Ten or so years ago I was able to purchase several dozen bottles of wines made by the late Maurice O'Shea (he died in 1956) at Mount Pleasant in the Hunter Valley. McWilliam's had first acquired a half interest in Mount Pleasant, and then full ownership, but O'Shea continued to make the wines precisely as he always had.
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