Bandwidth efficiency of wireless multicast can be improved substantially by exploiting the fact that several receivers can be reached at the MAC layer by a single transmission. The multicast nature of the transmissions, however, introduces several design challenges, and systematic design approaches that have been used effectively in unicast and wireline multicast do not apply in wireless multicast. For example, a transmission policy that maximizes the stability region of the network need not maximize the network throughput. Therefore, the objective is to design a policy that decides when a sender should transmit in order to maximize the system throughput subject to maintaining the system stability. We present a sufficient condition that can be used to establish the throughput optimality of a stable transmission policy. We subsequently design an adaptive stable policy that allows a sender to decide when to transmit using simple computations based only on limited information about current transmissions in its neighborhood, and without using any information about the network statistics. The proposed policy attains the same throughput as the optimal offline stable policy that uses in its decision process past, present, and even future network states. We prove the throughput optimality of this policy using the suffi- cient condition and the large deviation results. We present a MAC protocol for acquiring the local information necessary for executing this policy, and implement it in ns-2. The performance evaluations demonstrate that the optimal strategy significantly outperforms the existing approaches in adhoc networks consisting of several multicast and unicast sessions.