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Yarra Valley Is Ushering in a New Era of Australian Winemaking

In a historic Australian winemaking region that was almost lost to history, a second wave of plantings has revealed the potential of Victorian wine.

Harvest is in full swing when I arrive at Mount Mary, a small, single vineyard estate in the prestigious Yarra Valley in Victoria, a historic winemaking region in southeast Australia. Third-generation winemaker Sam Middleton peels away from his crew, who are busy maneuvering vats filled with grapes toward the crusher, and ushers me over to a bluff overlooking the vines to chat about the terroir. Gently rolling hills stretch out in what seems like every shade of green, broken up by areas of sunlight and shadow, and the neat rows of plantings are buffered by plenty of surrounding countryside. 

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The landscape here is just as beautiful as the vineyards in Tuscany, Bordeaux or Napa, though a formidable 16-hour flight (which climbs to upwards of 21 hours if you’re coming from the East Coast) has proven a bit prohibitive for some North American visitors. But as the quality of wine produced in Victoria is increasingly lauded as some of the best in the world, the region has become impossible to ignore—especially for wine lovers. With a climate that Middleton remembers his grandfather identifying back in the ‘70s as “a little bit warmer than Burgundy and not quite as warm as Bordeaux,” there’s still an ongoing debate about what kinds of grapes, exactly, should define the area. The resulting face-off makes the trip even more rewarding for visitors. 

Though this relatively cool climate region of Australia has a history of grape-growing that dates back to before the 1870s, an economic downturn in the next half-century effectively wiped it off the broader winemaking map. Once-robust vineyards were ripped out by the 1920s, and the land was instead used for sheep farming and dairy production. Meanwhile, the characteristics of Victoria’s more prominent neighbor, the Barossa Valley in South Australia, clouded the typical international understanding of what Australian wine is—or more importantly, what it can be. 

Sarah Crowe, winemaker and general manager at Yarra Yering, one of the oldest, most acclaimed producers in the area, finds that stereotypes about bold, hearty wines from South Australia still reign supreme. “Yarra Valley in Victoria is a cool climate area, but when someone in North America thinks of Australian wine, they’re probably thinking of quite ripe, soft acid, juicy wines,” Crowe says. “Here, it’s a little more European. We’ve got brighter acidity,........

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