2019 Elizabeth Cellar Aged Hunter Valley Semillon, Mount Pleasant

• Style: Bone Dry, Cellar-Aged
• Taste: Honey, toast, vanilla with crisp mineral acidity
• Food: Roasted chicken, white fish, crab, asparagus
• Occasion: Sunday lunch, weeknight elegance
• Serve: 10.5% abv, decant and cellar 5–15 years

In the Glass — Tasting Notes

Five years in Mount Pleasant's cellars have transformed this wine from bright and lemony into something altogether richer. Honey and toast interleave with vanilla and lanolin, yet the crisp acidity that made it worth keeping still cuts clean through. At 10.5% abv, it drinks with grace rather than weight, and the Sandy loam soils of the Lovedale vineyard lend the wine a mineral snap underneath the riper fruit tones. This is Semillon at its most rewarding: bottle age isn't decoration, it's transformation.

The Winery — Mount Pleasant

Founded in 1921 by Maurice O'Shea, the father of modern Australian winemaking, Mount Pleasant has spent over a century creating elegant, balanced wines built to age. O'Shea studied at Montpellier University before establishing his hillside vineyard in the Hunter Valley, pioneering quality table wine when Australia produced mainly fortified wines. Today, winemaker Adrian Sparks continues this legacy of restrained, graceful winemaking from the estate's historic vineyards including 'Old Hill', 'Old Paddock', 'Rosehill' and 'Lovedale'. The 2019 Elizabeth comes exclusively from younger vines within Lovedale, harvested in cool morning hours, pressed gently to retain only the finest free-run juice, then fermented slowly and cool to preserve signature brightness.

At Your Table — Food Pairing & Serving

This wine sits beautifully alongside roasted chicken—the honey notes play off caramelised skin—and works equally well with grilled white fish, crab, or asparagus dishes where its textural weight and lingering acidity find their match. Elizabeth will keep effortlessly for another 15 years, so there's no rush to drink it now; decant it in five or ten, when even more aromatic depth will have emerged. Explore Australia's finest white wines and browse our complete Hunter Valley selection for more of this region's elegant expressions.