The state’s most important region quantitatively is the Barossa Valley. Barossa was observed to bear striking similarities to the Rhône Valley and Shiraz was deemed the appropriate flagship, growing in steam across Barossa and South Australian regions at large as Australian export ambitions forged ahead with the transition from a colonial fortified wine culture, to the modern day fabric of dry wines and pristine winemaking that from a technical standpoint at least, lead the world. The state’s Shiraz vines are today, the oldest in existence.

Yet the irrefutable challenges of Global Warming have lead to a rethink. Cultivars forgotten and often dug up in the name of brand Shiraz have forced a reshuffle and a renaissance. In Barossa and neighbouring McLaren Vale in particular, Barossa’s dynamic and more experimental neighbour, there is a palpable shift in the paradigm.

Grenache and Mataro are increasingly relished for quality wine and to supplement their paucity, new plantings are being added. Both varieties are sturdy and heat-resistant, while Mataro is equipped with a natural tannic kit and bright acidity. Their later ripening physiognomies, too, better suited to very warm to hot regions.

Grenache, in particular, is soaring in fashionability. It performs particularly well on the sandy, schistous and calcareous outcrops of the more continental Barossa and on the elevated sands and ironstone of the quintessentially maritime McLaren Vale. An example of a high performing sub-region is Blewitt Springs, the equivalent of a McLaren Vale grand cru. Subsequently the moniker is increasingly seen on wine labels, with Clarendon only a notch behind. Grenache’s renaissance has inspired debate about Barossa and McLaren Vale’s vinous future. While Shiraz remains the mainstay for now, prescient growers have begun to embrace other Mediterranean cultivars, many serving as varietal wines on their own stage, as much as blending agents to confer complexity and structural prowess. These include Nero d’Avola, Fiano, Picpoul, Carignan, Cinsault, Clairette, Grenache Blanc and the glorious Roussanne, among others.

Elsewhere in the state, the Clare Valley continues to service unerringly traditional red wines, led by the iconic Wendouree, while the Eden Valley is led by Henschke and Australia’s most highly traded site-specific wine on the secondary market, Hill of Grace. Yet for many wine lovers, these two regions are temples of dry, tensile Riesling. While Eden benefits from elevation, Clare is paradoxically inland as arable soils empty into the desert beyond. Yet Clare’s propitious positioning at the base of the Mount Lofty Ranges services diurnal shifts capable of preserving Riesling’s fever pitch of freshness and intense citrus flavours.

In stark contrast, the bucolic steeps, ravines and meanders of the Adelaide Hills has become the dominion of the natural wine movement, as much as the region serves up a panoply of fine, cooler climatic expressions of Chardonnay, Sauvignon and to a declining extent (as Climate Change erodes potentiality), Pinot Noir.

And then there is Coonawarra, a region more than any other in the country, founded on a geology that promised fine wine. After all, it was not ‘lifestyle’ that drew grape growers to a stark, flat and isolated zone almost equidistant between Adelaide and Melbourne. It was limestone, the hallowed turf of France’s greatest wines. As James Halliday, Australia’s most influential wine writer, notes in his definitive Australian Wine Companion, “in South Australia, Coonawarra stands supreme, its climate ... strikingly similar to that of Bordeaux”. The result is “perfectly detailed Cabernets”.

Further Reading