Mount Pleasant
Maurice O'Shea Hunter Valley Shiraz
2006

The producer

The original Old Hill vineyard in the lower Hunter Valley was planted by Charles King in 1880 and purchased by the legendary Maurice O’Shea in 1921 together with adjoining parcels. He called the property Mount Pleasant.

Having studied oenology and viticulture at Montpellier University in France Maurice O’Shea set about crafting fine table wines from parcels of vines in the Hunter Valley. In 1932 the McWilliam family - a successful producer of fortified wines in the Riverina - acquired a half share of the winery, and the remainder in 1941, while allowing O’Shea to continue his work. This allowed for the purchase in 1946 of Rosehill (then planted to Syrah) and Lovedale (Semillon) and the creation of wines throughout the 1940s and 1950s, until his death in 1956. Maurice O’Shea remain legendary to this day. 

These are wines with ethereal balance that defied their elegance by aging for decades. Mount Pleasant returned to those glory days in the 2000s sourcing fruit from vines planted by O’Shea, while respecting his philosophy of releasing small lots of distinctly individual wines.

In 2021 McWilliams was purchased and Mount Pleasant (having already had dropped the family name from the labels several years before) is now an independent entity.

The wine

The Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea, named for the founder of Mount Pleasant and legendary creator of Hunter wines, is spoken of in reverential tones. Parcels from the best vineyards are blended in a wine to honour Maurice O’Shea as he had blended wines and named them after friends in the 1950s. Arguably the Hunter Valley’s best red year in, year out.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.