Vintage History

RECENT YEARS  

2023

2023 was a very cold and wet year, though it warmed and dried up a bit for harvest which was helpful to fully ripen the grapes. Yields were low due to shoot and bunch thinning, and the quality was exceptional - the best I’ve seen in Mudgee. The Pinot especially enjoyed the cool!

2022

The second consistently cold and wet vintage in Mudgee in a row saw the vines in absolutely excellent health, with no street, and with plenty of energy to ripen the grapes slowly and steady for optimal fruit. The resulting wines have beautiful and intense fruit flavours and lovely natural acid. 2022 was a superb vintage for whites, and it is fantastic to be able to release them at 2 years of age, giving them plenty of time to settle into bottle and for the true fruit characters to emerge.

2021

A beautifully cool, significantly cooler than Summer 2019 (mean maximum temperatures of 28.35 vs 34.3). February felt autumnal, with cold nights regularly below 10 degrees and crisp mornings. Harvest was slow and steady, with the varieties ripening one by one. Yields were good and the fruit stunning - clean and elegantly flavoured, with refined acids and lovely tannin structure.

2020

All fruit lost due to bushfire smoke taint.

2019

The wines from 2019 are full flavoured thanks to a vintage marked by drought. Our old vines stood up well to the dry conditions thanks to our bore-based irrigation system. This ensured excellent leaf canopy and shading through the fruit ripening part of the season.

2018

2018 was characterized by intensely dry heat spells followed by short, heavy rainfall. With a lot of hard work from our vineyard team, we picked our fruit very early to beat the heat and secured stunning, evenly ripened fruit with clean, restrained acids.

2017

2017 was a great red vintage, and the culmination of a huge amount of hard work understanding how to manage the warmer seasons in the vineyard and winery. The promise of the wines was evident from the start with colour and chemistry (pH, acids etc.), and the flavours and structure followed through.

2016

2016 was one of those vintages where everything falls into place – the weather, the timing, the yields and the flavours all hit the sweet spot. A cool, wet start to the season with a great lift of warmth throughout vintage. A steady ripening period with timely rain produced high quality fruit with great acid and flavour.

MUSEUM

Huntington Estate produces wine with a clear and consistent style and character, but every vintage is different thanks to varying weather conditions in that year and the preceding one.

This variation is part of the charm of the single vineyard, estate grown wines, in opposition to the coca-cola style “factory-made” wines produced to be consistent by sourcing grapes from all over the country.

It makes the production and the consumption a discovery every year. Here is Tim’s snapshot of each vintage for the last 15 years. The vintage ratings (out of 5) are his personal opinion, and this is a generalisation; obviously there will be exceptions for the better and the worse in each year.