The news graced the locally established vineyard earlier this month, and Robert Oatley Vineyards Marketing and Communications manager, Darren Jahn says the vintage is clearly 'showing up in the quality of wine'.

"We entered the Montrose Mudgee Black Shiraz 2018 in the shiraz class and it won gold, therefore the top gold and trophy for the best shiraz in the show," he said.

"It's a pretty exciting win for the Mudgee region because it beat all of those fantastic South Australian shirazs. Clearly it stood out on the day.

"The tasting process would have easily seen 200 or more wines in the class, so it clearly met the mark for quality with a number of judges.

"The black shiraz in particular is a regular gold medalist, if not sometimes a trophy winner."

The 'regular' award winning red wasn't alone in a top prize for Robert Oatley with their grenache also staking a claim.

"At that same show, Royal Adelaide, we ended up winning the best South Australian red wine of the show for our grenache we make at McLaren Vale," Mr Jahn said.

"It was nice to be able to do well with both a Mudgee red and South Australian red."

At the time of publication, the vineyard was awaiting the results of the NSW Wine Awards with Mr Jahn confident of a successful result given the black had struck gold once again, this time in the preliminary medal class 21 category.

"That wine [black shiraz] is the only Mudgee wine to have won a gold in that so we're just waiting until the end of next week and we may have done better there," he said.

While COVID-19 has had a wrath of effects on various other fields within the local community, the pandemic has ultimately been less of a disruption to the winery sector in comparison to last summer's disastrous bushfire crisis.

"We had bigger issues with the fires last year over summer which reduced crops but otherwise everything is hunky dory," Mr Jahn said.

"Obviously when it was fully locked down we had very little visitors but as soon as it opened up to traveling in the state, we've seen a tremendous increase in visitation.

"We have recently introduced some changes to our cellar door format so people can enjoy wines by the glass and some food as well which we haven't had for a while.

"It's been a really good time over the last few months, we're not complaining."