Australian veterans were given land grants in the Hunter Valley. This temporarily produced an up-tick in plantings but the global Great Depression as well as a series of devastating hail storms between 1929 and 1930 caused many growers to abandon their vineyards. Some of the land was bought up by the growing wine estates of Tyrrell, Elliotts and Wyndham that would later become driving forces behind the Hunter Valley's next boom period. Another pivotal figure during this period was Maurice O'Shea of Mount Pleasant vines in the Pokolbin area. While many producers in Australia were focusing on fortified wine, O'Shea continued to espouse the virtue of Australian dry table wines. O'Shea's foresight would pay off as consumer taste shifted towards drier styles of wine in the 1950s and 1960s. A flurry of plantings began in the Hunter, including 1963 establishment of Lake's Folly by a Sydney surgeon, Dr. Max Lake. Along with Rudy Komon, Johnny Walker and wine columnist Len Evans, who all believed in the future of the Australian wine industry, Lake begin to extensively plant red wine varietals, including the reintroduction of Cabernet Sauvignon to the Hunter Valley. 1960s to present-day In the 1960s, a Sydney wine merchant named Leo Buring began marketing the first commercially successful Hunter Valley Semillon under the label "Rhine Gold". In 1971, Murray Tyrrell released Australia's first commercial bottling of Chardonnay which signalled the beginning of the Australian Chardonnay craze. According to wine experts Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson, Tyrrell's Vat 47 Hunter Valley Chardonnay was the wine that "launched a million bottles." From 1956 to 1976, plantings in the Hunter Valley grew from to over . Despite a slight reduction during the global recession of the 1980s, the Australian wine boom of the 1990s pushed plantings even further to over . While the Hunter Valley has been supplanted by the massive Riverina wine region as the largest producer of New South Wales wine, it still accounts for around 3% of Australia's total wine production and is one of the country's most recognisable regions. Today there are over 150 wineries in the Hunter, producing a wide range of wine. Climate While the Hunter Valley is usually grouped in with the rest of Australia as having a Mediterranean climate, the climate is actually humid subtropical, with distinctive maritime influences from the Pacific Ocean. With its northerly latitude and close oceanic influences, the Hunter Valley