Review: Meerea Park Terracotta Semillon 2015

April 27, 2020

Hunter Valley Semillon, but in a Riesling bottle. Blasphemous, maybe, but do you really care? Will it stop you from buying this Meerea Park Terracotta Semillon 2015?

My take – I don’t care if the juice is good. And I like this Meerea Park Sem. Sourced from the Leonard Estate vineyard, known for terracotta coloured soils. So unconventional dirt for classic Hunter Sem, where the best Semillon is on sandy soils, not the red clay. An unconventional bottle for a (somewhat) unconventional wine.

But it’s not really unconventional. It’s lean and green white with a real phenolic tang. Primal. Classical styles. Maybe a bit too lean, but that’s the mode – it’s for drinking next year or later, not now. There’s an unquestioned purity and a surety. You know where this is going (and it’s a good place), the middling nature of some ’15 Hunter Sems not evident here.

Best drinking: I’d wait 2-3 then for a decade. 17.7/20, 92/100+. 11%, $31.50. Would I buy it? Well worth a bottle for the cellar.

2015, Hunter, Semillon

Andrew Graham was once voted the 23rd most trusted wine critic on the planet. A WCA Journalism Young Gun now old hack with 25yrs as a buyer, judge, journalist, marketer and too much more.

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4 responses to “Review: Meerea Park Terracotta Semillon 2015”

Mahmoud Ali

April 28, 2020 at 10:03 am

I once refused to buy a bottle of wine that I had heard was quite good mainly because it had an odd shaped bottle that would have made it difficult to cellar. It was called Suckfizzle and had this extraordinarily tall neck that wouldn’t fit in any normal box so I gave it a miss. I can imagine the frustration of someone who wants to cellar this wine but having to put it among their Rieslings.

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Vinnie

April 28, 2020 at 3:56 pm

Don’t forget that some of the great Hunter semillons of the past were referred to as riesling and came in riesling bottles. Nothing new. Just sayin’.

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Andrew Graham

April 28, 2020 at 7:10 pm

I’ve had plenty of old 80s Hunter Sems in Riesling bottles. Bottle shapes mean nothing.

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Mahmoud Ali

April 29, 2020 at 6:36 am

I agree that the bottle shape is irrelevant to the contents of the bottle. I just know that unless there is something extraordinarily special about a wine, given that there are so many other wines competing for my dollar, I would rather get a wine that doesn’t require a space of it’s own. Over the years I’ve moved my wines a number of times and often had to rearrange the bottles to fill up the empty spaces in my Bordeaux crates or cardboard cartons. It is quite frustrating when a bottle of wine will not fit into a box with it’s brethren wines from the same vintage, region, or varietal. For example my 1998 Peppertree Shiraz is in a mixed box of other tall bottles, and not with other Hunter or Shiraz wines. Last year I couldn’t resist buying an old bottle of 1999 Taurasi wine and was confronted with a problem of where to put it. I’m not sure where it is now, likely lying sideways in a wooden box. If I had bought that long-necked Suckfizzle they would have been box mates.

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