Mount Mary's 2022 vintage release

For its members, Mount Mary’s annual release is one of the most anticipated in the calendar. Since the mid ’70s, the Yarra Valley winery has marked the occasion by opening its doors and throwing a party of sorts for those on its mailing list. Winemaker Sam Middleton opens a few older vintages alongside the new releases, and over a glass and some cheese, members catch up, see how some of the older wines are developing and then, at the end, collect their order.  

Winemaker Sam Middleton.

“They’re really fun, enjoyable days for us,” says Sam. “We don’t have a cellar door so it’s the only opportunity that we get to really mingle with our customers and chat with them.
 
“A lot of our customers buy our wines to cellar for 10, 15, 20 years, so I like that this also gives them an opportunity to taste a selection of back vintages without opening their own,” Sam adds. “One of the most common questions I get is, ‘when should I be drinking certain vintages?’, but the answer is so personal. This way they can see for themselves.”
 
For everyone else, the latest release of Mount Mary’s four estate wines – the Halliday-award winning Quintet, plus the Triolet, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay – will hit shelves in mid-October. Sam says the 2022 vintage was “pretty awesome” overall, the wines a “bit more fruit-forward, a bit brighter and more expressive and a bit more approachable in their youth” than the 2021s.
 
Since 2013, those on the mailing list have been able to buy the Triolet or the Chardonnay under their choice of screwcap or Diam 30. “I don’t see a discrepancy in quality between the two, I see it as a stylistic change,” says Sam, adding that the whites under screwcap tend to be “a little tighter and more linear in the way they drink,” and those under Diam showing “a bit more flesh and fruit weight and concentration in the palate.”
 
But the reds are always bottled under cork. “We’ve trialled screw cap on reds as well, but we prefer the way that our wines develop under either Diam or natural cork,” he says.

Mount Mary ready to receive members during release day. Image credit: Katrina Butler.

Pioneering Yarra Valley producer Mount Mary was established in 1971 by John and Marli Middleton and is considered today to be one of Australia’s best wineries. It’s also inadvertently responsible for much of James Halliday’s career, as it was a bottle of Mount Mary pinot that prompted James’ move from Sydney. “In a split second, I knew the Yarra Valley was the Xanadu of Australian pinot, and that somehow, someday, I would grow and make pinot noir there,” James said.
 
Read Philip Rich’s reviews of Mount Mary’s 2022 wines below.