After three days of judging, Wine writer and head judge Greg Duncan Powell said Mudgee wine was “in very good shape.”

Orange winemaker Stephen Doyle urged Mudgee to take pride in its history as one of Australia’s earliest vineyard sites and as a pioneering region in Italian varieties and organic viticulture.

He said the judges had awarded an amazing number of medals in a variety of classes, and Mudgee wineries should be proud and promote the quality of their work.

“Be proud of the history and where it’s going and what it’s potential is,” Mr Duncan Powell said.

While he saw Mudgee’s versatility as a promotional challenge, because many wine regions liked to market themselves with a single flagship variety, he urged the local wine industry to embrace diversity.

Mr Duncan Powell said he was already a fan of Mudgee wines before judging the show for the first time.

“When I started drinking wine, it would have been 80 per cent Mudgee,” he said.

Mr Doyle agreed, having used Mudgee grapes in his wines in the 1970s, loved the wine for a long time, and “drunk too much of it, probably.”

Renee Foster of Ultimo Wine Centre, the show’s third judge, had been familiar with Mudgee’s reds, but was pleased last week to discover the quality of the region’s white wines.

She was impressed by the balance and vibrancy of the white varieties, including Mudgee’s aged museum wines, which showed that excellent whites were not just a recent trend.

Jacob Stein of Robert Stein Winery and Lowe Wines winemaker Liam Heslop joined the panel as an associate to practise wine judging.

“It was amazing,” Mr Heslop said. “It was my first time being part of a wine show at all.”

He said it was great to confirm that his palate and scores aligned with those of the other judges, and to taste Mudgee’s older wines in the museum class, particularly the “unbelievable” whites.

In many wine shows, even the museum class is limited to commercially available wines, and few date back further than 2005.

In Mudgee, wineries can enter the museum class even if they are presenting their last bottle of a particular vintage, and two of this year’s wines dated back to 1984.

Mr Stein suggested this was emblematic of Mudgee’s approach to wine not as a commodity, but as something in which to take pride.

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