James Halliday recalls some of his earliest visits to the Hunter Valley

With this edition’s focus on wine travel, James Halliday shares some fond memories from his earliest visits to the Hunter Valley, which helped shape his path in wine.

IT WAS, I suppose, written in the stars that I would find my way to the Hunter Valley, however unlikely the journey might have seemed at its inception. Or, indeed, conception; I have long speculated that my mother’s blood may have had an infusion of Lindeman’s Hunter Valley Semillon when she fell pregnant with me. You see, my father was an eminent cardiologist with rooms in Sydney’s Macquarie Street, and he had an active private customer account with Lindeman’s, all of its table wines coming from its Hunter Valley vineyards (all of his wines were Lindeman’s; in the late 1950s I gave him a bottle of ’53 Grange that he hated).

In the 1930s – and, indeed, through to the ’50s – doctors had a status in society very different to that of today. They were a type of protected species, treated with utmost respect. When he visited

Lindeman’s, then co-tenant of the basement of Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, he purchased dozens of bottles of Private Bin Riesling/Hock/Chablis/White Burgundy (all in fact semillon) and Claret and Burgundy (shiraz in different bottle shapes).

Fast forward to 1955, and I’m headed to Sydney University for six years of Arts/Law studies, residing in St Paul’s College for each academic year. I had become familiar with Lindeman’s wines at home, but the college wine cellar had a broader spread; Penfolds conspicuous, Tulloch a de facto leader of the Hunter Valley wines. We were permitted to bring wine for dinner in the Great Hall on Wednesday night (clad in our black academic gowns) and Sunday lunch. Paul’s – as it was called by all and sundry – also had a Wine Club, Rhinecastle (Tulloch’s distributor) the source of many of its wines.

Rhinecastle, linked with retailer HG Brown, arranged twice-yearly trips to the Hunter, and we quickly learned the quickest way. There was no expressway, just the old Pacific Highway for the first half, and we turned off to Peats Ridge, thence Mangrove Mountain. At this point, the road became dirt (made with convict labour) as it wended and snaked down through Kulnura and Bucketty to the Wollombi Valley, all dots on the map and with the occasional house.

CENTRAL TO this stage of the trip was the convict drinking trough, where custom demanded we stop for a glass of champagne with (or for) breakfast. The trough was a shallow basin carved into the wall of sandstone on the driver’s side of the road (heading north). It was a half-metre long, and only held water in the aftermath of recent rain. But it became a repository for champagne corks that also littered the side of the road. Our most usual car in the ’50s was a Volkswagon beetle, okay for four, impossibly crammed with five on the one occasion we tried it. As we descended into the Wollombi Valley in winter, spears of ice adorned ancient fences and low-growing bushes and trees.

The road was seldom graded and on one memorable occasion driving back to Sydney, the steering wheel became disconnected. With shiraz in our veins, it caused great mirth. Somehow the more mechanically adept passengers (not me) restored the wheel and we continued our journey.

The trip took more than three and a half hours from Paul’s, and given the absence of a motel in Cessnock (the hotel’s limited facilities didn’t appeal) it was a long day’s return trip. If it was a Tulloch event, we feasted on massive thick-cut T-bone steaks, cooked on a sizzling flatiron barbecue plate over a fire on the dirt floor of the main vat and storage area of the winery. There was a cold-water tap with a small open drain that was used to rinse our single glass of ’54 and ’58 Tulloch Private Bin Shiraz, both prolific trophy winners. In those days, the standard was a thick-rimmed glass, the size of the bowl roughly the same as an egg. When the Chinese-made ISO glasses later became the standard fare in wine shows, they were diabolical, thanks to different colours, subtle and ever-varying, that could make a fresh young white wine appear pink or brown if you looked closely enough.

After finishing my degrees, I disappeared to Europe for a year, and on returning in 1962, began to buy Lindeman’s wines faster than I consumed them and started a cellar under my bed in the house that I shared with friends, who were also lawyers. I also took occasional trips to the Hunter with two other legal contemporaries, Tony Albert and John Beeston.

IT WAS A STRANGE TIME. There was still no expressway, no acceptable accommodation in Cessnock, and no cellar doors as we understand that term today. Elliotts had a cellar door shop in Cessnock – although we were blissfully unaware of it – and in 1963, Max Lake bought a nob of red soil at the bottom of Broke Road and planted cabernet sauvignon on it, yielding a bucket or two of grapes in the fabulous 1965 vintage (decades before opening a cellar door). We gained entry to Tyrrell’s when they weren’t selling bottled wine to the public, a young Anne Tyrrell typing labels on chemist lab serrated, blue outlined paper.

On these trips, knowing there wasn’t a single shop in Pokolbin, we brought a well-stocked picnic hamper – with wine, beer and water – and found a dead-end spur high on Mount View Road looking out over a broad sweep of the Hunter Valley. Lindeman’s and McWilliam’s didn’t receive visitors, and we couldn’t care less.

In 1966, I became a partner in my law firm, and in the twinkling of an eye, Tony, John – both sadly deceased – and I formed Brokenwood in 1970. Having moved to Melbourne in 1983 for my firm and to chase pinot noir, in another twinkle I formed Coldstream Hills in 1985, which, in 1996, was acquired by Southcorp, and I became group winemaker for Devil’s Lair in Margaret River, Coldstream Hills, and Lindeman’s in the Hunter Valley.

The long journey was completed.

After finishing my degrees, I disappeared to Europe for a year, and on returning in 1962, began to buy Lindeman’s wines faster than I consumed them and started a cellar under my bed in the house I shared with friends...