Tyrrell's

Tyrrell’s is the keeper of the Hunter Valley’s oldest winemaking tradition — a fifth-generation family estate whose Vat 1 is the benchmark by which age-worthy Australian Semillon is judged.

Five generations at Ashmans

Edward Tyrrell, newly arrived from England, took up 320 acres of Hunter Valley land in 1858, named it “Ashmans,” and built an ironbark slab hut that still stands on the property. He planted Shiraz and Semillon and made his first vintage in 1864. The estate has passed down the family ever since, an unbroken line now reaching a fifth generation.

Two figures shaped it. Edward George “Uncle Dan” Tyrrell made an astonishing sixty-nine consecutive vintages, carrying the estate through the lean decades when Hunter wine was unfashionable. His nephew Murray Tyrrell then transformed it commercially in the second half of the twentieth century, ending the practice of selling wine in bulk to other producers and instead bottling the best under Tyrrell’s own label — the wines that made the estate famous: Vat 1 Semillon, Vat 9 Shiraz, and Vat 47 Chardonnay, one of the pioneering Australian Chardonnays. Today fourth-generation Bruce Tyrrell is managing director and his son Chris Tyrrell, the fifth generation, leads the winemaking.

Vat 1 and the old vines

Tyrrell’s holds some of the oldest own-rooted vines in the world — the Hunter, like much of Australia, largely escaped phylloxera, so ungrafted vineyards planted in the nineteenth century still crop. From this heritage comes the estate’s signature.

Vat 1 Semillon, drawn from the Short Flat vineyard, is the definitive expression of the Hunter style: picked early and low in alcohol, fermented bone-dry in tank with no oak, austere on release and then transforming over fifteen to twenty years into a honeyed, toasty wine of remarkable complexity. It is one of the most successful wines in the history of the Australian wine show system, and the reference point for the style.

The estate’s medium-bodied Hunter Shiraz — savoury, earthy, and comparatively restrained against the Barossa archetype — is its other classic, a reminder that the Hunter’s warm, humid climate produces reds quite unlike the rest of the country, guided throughout by Edward Tyrrell’s motto: “Nothing is great unless it is good.”